The Basic Radar Altimetry Toolbox is a collection of tools, tutorials and documents designed to facilitate the use of radar altimetry data. It is able to read most distributed radar altimetry data, from ERS-1 & 2, Topex/Poseidon, Geosat Follow-on, Jason-1 and 2, Envisat, and the future Cryosat mission, to perform some processing, data editing and statistic, and to visualise the results. As part...

Knowledge of sea ice thickness is critical for the prediction of future climate, and for assessing the significance of changes in thickness. Sea ice thickness can be calculated from radar or laser satellite altimetry measurements of freeboard. However, a lack of knowledge of snow depth introduces significant uncertainties into these calculations. This paper compares the first coincident airborn...

Satellite radar altimetry, initially designed for studying ocean surface topography, demonstrated a strong potential for the continuous monitoring of ice sheets and land surfaces over the last 25 years. If radar altimetry is mostly used for its capacity to determine surface height, the backscattering coefficients provide information on the surface properties. Spatio-temporal variations of radar...

Monitoring the variation of rivers and lakes is of great importance. Satellite radar altimetry is a promising technology to do this on a regional to global scale. Satellite radar altimetry data has been used successfully to observe water levels in lakes and (large) rivers, and has also been combined with hydrologic/hydrodynamic models. Except CryoSat-2, all radar altimetry missions have been op...

Contemporary applications of radar altimetry include sea-level rise, ocean circulation, marine gravity, and icesheet elevation change. Unlike InSAR and GNSS, which are widely used to map surface deformation, altimetry is neither reliant on highly temporally-correlated ground features nor as limited by the available spatial coverage, and can provide long-term temporal subsidence monitoring capab...

[1] Ontario Lacus is the largest and best characterized lake in Titan’s south polar region. In June and July 2009, the Cassini RADAR acquired its first Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) images of the area. Together with closest approach altimetry acquired in December 2008, these observations provide a unique opportunity to study the lake’s nearshore bathymetry and complex refractive properties. Av...

The exploitation of synthetic aperture properties in nadir-looking radars is opening new scenarios in the framework of satellite radar altimetry. Both recent and upcoming missions including Cryosat-2, Sentinel-3, Sentinel-6 and SWOT take benefit from the coherent processing of radar data, aimed at improving range measurements in particular contexts, such as ice, open ocean, coastal zone, and ev...

Water level reduction with GNSS [FIG Commission 4 Working Group 4.2 2006, Dodd and Mills 2011] requires the availability of the ellipsoidal heights of CD, i.e. the Lowest Astronomical Tide (LAT) as adopted by the International Hydrographic Organization [International Hydrographic Organization, 2011, Technical Resolution 3/1919]. LAT is defined as the lowest tide level to occur under average met...

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...