easuring changes in the cryosphere from satellite-based altimeters has and will continue to provide data that are essential to our understanding of the long-term trends of the earth’s ice cover. over the past years, ApL has played a major role in airborne field activities observing continental ice sheets, outlet glaciers, and sea ice using the delayDoppler phase-monopulse (D2p) airborne radar a...

An algorithm for the retrieval of surface wind speed from Ku-band altimeter backscatter coefficient is proposed. The algorithm was derived using two-month worth of ENVISAT altimeter backscatter data collocated with ECMWF model and buoy wind speeds. The algorithm was extensively verified for ENVISAT, ERS2 and Jason-1 altimeters. The algorithm performance is better than the “modified Chelton-Went...

Successfully launched on 30 May 2016, ZY3-02 is the first Chinese surveying and mapping satellite equipped with a lightweight laser altimeter. Calibration is necessary before the laser altimeter becomes operational. Laser footprint location prediction is the first step in calibration that is based on ground infrared detectors, and it is difficult because the sample frequency of the ZY3-02 laser...

A model for ocean wave period from satellite altimeter data proposed by Gommenginger et al (2003; [1]) was applied to a dataset of ENVISAT RA2 measurements collocated with moored buoy data for cycle 15 to 26. Although the ocean wave period model was developed for Topex data gathered between 1993 and 1998, we find that the model performs equally well for RA2 Kuband without any need for adjustmen...

Motivated by the recent interest in ocean energetics, the widespread use of horizontal eddy viscosity in models, and the promise of high horizontal resolution data from the planned wide-swath satellite altimeter, this paper explores the impacts of horizontal eddy viscosity and horizontal grid resolution on geostrophic turbulence, with a particular focus on spectral kinetic energy fluxes P(K) co...

We form a new 'blended' data set of sea level anomaly (SLA) fields by combining gridded daily fields derived from altimeter data with coastal tide gauge data. Within approximately 55-70 km of the coast, the altimeter data are discarded and replaced by a linear interpolation between the tide gauge and remaining offshore altimeter data. To create a common reference height for altimeter and tide g...

Quasi-simultaneous measurements of the ocean surface by the Canada Centre for Remote Sensing (CCRS) Convair-580 (CV-580) synthetic aperture radar (SAR) were acquired on March 20, 1988, along an ascending pass of the Geosat radar altimeter as part of the prelaunch ERS-1 Norwegian Continental Shelf Experiment (NORCSEX '88). Over a region where the SAR look direction is parallel to the wind vector...

Nadir-looking microwave radiometers are flown on different altimeter missions to correct the altimeter range for water vapor and cloud liquid water path delay in the troposphere. Actually four sensors, TOPEX, JASON-1, ERS2, and ENVISAT micro-wave radiometers (MWR) provide continuous measurements and the aim of this paper is to compare their measured brightness temperatures over the same hot ref...

The article examines the features of the radar altimeter reflected signal modeling over the sea surface. The model operates at different wave heights, pitch and roll angels, speeds of the aircraft and widths of the antenna pattern. A brief description of the radio altimeter influencing factors is made. Modeling results are analyzed. The complex of hardware-in-the-loop (HIL) simulation with the ...