Within the German-Indonesian Tsunami Early Warning System project GITEWS (Rudloff et al., 2009), a feasibility study on a future tsunami detection system from space has been carried out. The Global Navigation Satellite System Reflectometry (GNSS-R) is an innovative way of using reflected GNSS signals for remote sensing, e.g. sea surface altimetry. In contrast to conventional satellite radar alt...

Satellite altimetry is used to identify and characterize Pacific intraplate seamounts. The gravimetric amplitudes of seamounts appear to be related to the age difference between seafloor and seamounts; by inverting this relationship pseudo ages can be obtained for undated seamounts. These pseudo ages imply that excursions in seamount volcanism generally correlate with times of formation of larg...

The surface topography of the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets is the principal ice parameter obtainable from satellite radar altimetry. The improved ability of the GEOSA T altimeter to follow irregular surfaces and its extended operation have greatly increased the available topographic data on ice sheets for the study of ice dynamics and the possible detection of changes in global ice volume.

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...

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...

Snow on Antarctic sea ice plays a key role for sea ice physical processes and complicates retrieval of sea ice thickness using altimetry. Current methods of snow depth retrieval are based on satellite microwave radiometry, which perform best for dry, homogeneous snow packs on level sea ice. We introduce an alternative approach based on in-situ measurements of total (sea ice plus snow) freeboard...

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...