Abstract. Lake ice, serving as a sensitive indicator of climate change, is an important regulator regional hydroclimate and lake ecosystems. For ice-covered lakes, traditional satellite altimetry-based water level estimation often subject to winter anomalies that are closely related the thickening ice. Despite recent efforts made exploit altimetry data resolve two interrelated variables, i.e., ...

CryoSat-2 (CS2) is the first mission equipped with a pulse-limited radar altimeter capable of operating in Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) Interferometric (SARIn) mode. Over ice sheets and caps, CS2 SARIn data have been used to retrieve surface elevations over an across-track ground “swath.” This work demonstrates that retracking multiple coherent peaks waveforms, combination interferometric pha...

This paper presents the Coastal Altimetry Waveform Retracking Expert System (CAWRES), a novel method to optimise the Jason satellite altimetric sea levels from multiple retracking solutions. CAWRES’ aim is to achieve the highest possible accuracy of coastal sea levels, thus bringing measurement of radar altimetry data closer to the coast. The principles of CAWRES are twofold. The first is to re...

The Arctic responds rapidly to climate change, and the melting of land ice is a major contributor observed present-day sea-level rise. coastal regions these ice-covered areas are showing most dramatic changes in form widespread thinning. Therefore, it vital improve monitoring help us better understand their contribution sea levels. In this study, we derive ice-surface elevations from swath proc...

High-precision GNSS (global navigation satellite e system) measurements can be used for remote sensing and nowadays play a significant role in atmospheric sounding (station data, radio occultation observations) sea surface altimetry based on reflectometry. A limiting factor of high-precision reflectometry is the loss coherent phase information due to sea-state-induced roughness. This work studi...

We demonstrate in this work how we can take advantage of known unfocused SAR (UF-SAR) retracking methods (e.g. the physical SAMOSA model) for fully-focused (FF-SAR) waveforms. Our insights are an important step towards consistent observations sea surface height, significant wave height and backscatter coefficient (wind speed) with both UF-SAR FF-SAR. This is particular interest altimetry coasta...

Since the launch of ENVISAT satellite in 2002, the Radar Altimetry Mission provides systematic altimeter observations of the Earth surface. The ENVISAT Geophysical Data Records products contain, over all type of surfaces, altimeter ranges derived from four specialized retrackers: Ocean, Ice-1, Ice-2 and Sea-Ice retracker. Among the different goals of the ENVISAT Mission, one directly concerns l...

Although the Brown mathematical model is the standard model for waveform retracking over open oceans, due to heterogeneous surface reflections within altimeter footprints, coastal waveforms usually deviate from open ocean waveform shapes and thus cannot be directly interpreted by the Brown model. Generally, the two primary sources of heterogeneous surface reflections are land surfaces and brigh...

As altimeter satellites approach coastal areas, the number of valid sea surface height measurements decrease dramatically because of land contamination. In recent years, different methodologies have been developed to recover data within 10–20 km from the coast. These include computation of geophysical corrections adapted to the coastal zone and retracking of raw radar echoes. In this paper, we ...