Open water areas surrounded by sea ice significantly influence the ocean-ice-atmosphere interaction and contribute to Arctic climate change. Satellite altimetry can detect these ice openings and enables one to estimate sea surface heights and further altimetry data derived products. This study introduces an innovative, unsupervised classification approach for detecting open water areas in the G...

Satellite altimetry has revolutionized the study of the global oceans for the past two decades. Precision altimetry missions like TOPEX/Poseidon, Jason-1, and OSTM/Jason­ 2, complemented by other missions like ERS 1 and 2, ENVISAT, and GFO, have provided unprecedented observations of the ocean surface topography at scales larger than about 200 km and made significant advances in our understandi...

Previous studies using satellite radar altimetry to observe inland river and wetland water level changes usually spatially average high-rate (10-Hz for TOPEX, 18-Hz for Envisat) measurements. Here we develop a technique to apply retracking of TOPEX waveforms by optimizing the estimated retracked gate positions using the Offset Center of Gravity retracker. This study, for the first time, utilize...

ICESat satellite laser altimetry provides an unprecedented set of global elevation measurements of the Earth, yielding great detail over ice, land and ocean surfaces. Coastal regions in particular, including seamless land-water transitions, benefit from the small footprint (50 to 90 m), high resolution (40 Hz, ~170 m along-track), and high precision (2 to 3 cm) of ICESat. We discuss the perform...

This report concerns the validation of surface velocity estimated from satellite images. The estimation is obtained with a dynamic model based on shallow-water equations. We first compare the stationary assumption to the shallow-water heuristics to justify our choice. Second, we quantify the quality of the estimation by measuring the misfit between the model output and the altimetry measures. E...

As a new spatial measuring technic developed in 1970s,altimetry was designed to determine the sea surface height based on spatial technology, electronic technology and microwave technology. It also plays an important role in geodesy and oceanography; meanwhile, it can provide all-weather and repetitious measurements in global region for the studying of variation of SSH, earth gravity field, oce...

precise geoid determination on islands suffers from the lack of accurate gravity data on the open seas. nowadays, sub-microgal accuracy for the land gravity observations is obtainable. but the sea gravity data which are collected via shipborne techniques, due to the measuring environment at sea area, are usually highly noisy and are contaminated with various systematic errors. on the other hand...

The Geodynamics Experimental Ocean Satellite (GEOS-3) radar altimeter has provided some information on the dynamic sea-surface topography of the global oceans. Regional studies of the densely surveyed Sargasso Sea indicate that the average nontidal variability of the oceans is +/- 28 centimeters. Sea-surface highs and lows determined from GEOS-3 altimetry correlate favorably with eddy structure...

The objective of this study is to determine spatio-temporal variations of water volume over inundated areas located in large river basins using combined observations from the Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) onboard the Japanese Earth Resources Satellite (JERS1), the Topex/Poseidon (T/P) altimetry satellite, and in-situ hydrographic stations. Ultimately, the goal is to quantify the role of floodp...