The sea level retrievals from the latest generation of radar altimeters (the SAR altimeters) are still challenging in coastal zone and areas covered by ice require a dedicated fitting (retracking) strategy for waveforms. In framework European Space Agency’s Baltic + Sea Level (ESA SEAL) project, an empirical retracking (ALES SAR), including state bias correction, has been designed to improve ob...

-This paper compares four cont/nental ice sheet radar altimeter retracking algorithms using airborne radar and laser altimeter data taken over the Greenland ice sheet in 1991. The refurbished Advanced Application Flight Experiment (AAFE) airborne radar altimeter has a large range window and stores the entire return waveform during flight. Once the return waveforms are retracked, or post-process...

Satellite radar altimetry is one of the most powerful techniques for measuring sea surface height variations, with applications ranging from operational oceanography to climate research. Over open oceans, altimeter return waveforms generally correspond to the Brown model, and by inversion, estimated shape parameters provide mean surface height and wind speed. However, in coastal areas or over i...

This study successfully uses satellite altimetry, including Topex/Poseidon and Jason-2, retrieved by novel retrackers to monitor vertical land motions in Southwestern Taiwan. Satellite altimetry was originally designed to measure open oceans, so waveform retracking should be applied to overcome the complex waveforms reflected from lands. Modified threshold and improved subwaveform threshold ret...

The altimeter emits a radar pulse, which is reflected at the nadir-surface and measures the two-way travel time, as well as the returned energy as a function of time, resulting in a return waveform. Over the open ocean the waveform shape corresponds to a theoretical model which can be used to infer information on range corrections, significant wave height or wind speed. However, the waveforms o...

S U M M A R Y Improving the accuracy of the marine gravity field requires both improved altimeter range precision and dense track coverage. After a hiatus of more than 15 yr, a wealth of suitable data is now available from the CryoSat-2, Envisat and Jason-1 satellites. The range precision of these data is significantly improved with respect to the conventional techniques used in operational oce...

Due to land contamination and human activities, the sea surface height (SSH) data retrieved from altimeter coastal waveforms have poor precision cannot provide effective information for various tasks. The along-track high-resolution characteristic of new synthetic aperture radar (SAR) makes retracking methods traditional difficult apply. This study proposes a partial reconstruction method SAR w...