Validation of an Empirical Subwaveform Retracking Strategy for SAR Altimetry
2022
Passaro, Marcello | Rautiainen, Laura | Dettmering, Denise | Restano, Marco | Hart-Davis, Michael G. | Schlembach, Florian | Särkkä, Jani | Müller, Felix L. | Schwatke, Christian | Benveniste, Jérôme
The sea level retrievals from the latest generation of radar altimeters (the SAR altimeters) are still challenging in the coastal zone and areas covered by sea ice and require a dedicated fitting (retracking) strategy for the waveforms. In the framework of the European Space Agency’s Baltic + Sea Level (ESA Baltic SEAL) project, an empirical retracking strategy (ALES + SAR), including a dedicated sea state bias correction, has been designed to improve the sea level observations in the Baltic Sea, characterised by a jagged coastline and seasonal sea ice coverage, without compromising the quality of open ocean data. In this work, the performances of ALES + SAR are validated against in-situ data in the Baltic Sea. Moreover, variance, crossover differences and power spectral density of the open ocean data are evaluated on a global scale. The results show that ALES + SAR performances are of comparable quality to the ones obtained using physical-based retrackers, with relevant advantages in coastal and sea ice areas in terms of quality and quantity of the sea level data.
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