Radar altimetry was initially designed to measure the marine geoid. Thanks to the improvement in the orbit determination from the meter to the centimeter level, this technique has been providing accurate measurements of the sea surface topography over the open ocean since the launch of Topex/Poseidon in 1992. In spite of a decrease in the performance over land and coastal areas, it is now commo...

M than 60% of the Earth’s land and shallow marine areas are covered by > 2 km of sediments and sedimentary rocks, with the thickest accumulations on rifted continental margins (Figure 1). Free-air marine gravity anomalies derived from Geosat and ERS-1 satellite altimetry (Fairhead et al., 2001; Sandwell and Smith, 2009; Andersen et al., 2009) outline most of these major basins with remarkable p...

The focus of this study is the assessment of the main range and geophysical corrections needed to derive accurate sea level time series from satellite altimetry in the Indonesia seas, the ultimate aim being the determination of sea level trend for this region. Due to its island nature, this is an area of large complexity for altimetric studies, a true laboratory for coastal altimetry. For this ...

Earth-based radar observations and results from the MESSENGER mission have provided strong evidence that permanently shadowed regions near Mercury's poles host deposits of water ice. MESSENGER's complete orbital image and topographic datasets enable Mercury's surface to be observed and modeled under an extensive range of illumination conditions. The shadowed regions of Mercury's north polar reg...

Long-term observations of lake water level are essential to our understanding of the evolution of Tibetan lake system. CryoSat-2 radar altimetry data over the Tibetan Plateau (2010–2014, P2) is used to extend lake level measurements from ICESat laser altimetry (2003–2009, P1). This study evaluates the performance of CryoSat-2 data by comparing with gauge-based water levels that are calibrated b...

The ability to measure land surface topography over large areas to assess natural hazard threats posed by seismic and flooding events is a critical, international need. Interferometric synthetic aperture radar (INSAR) has been used to map topography; however, accuracies are limited because observations are not measurements of true surface topography over vegetated areas. Instead, the measuremen...

Earth-based radar observations have provided information on the equatorial topography, sul3Pace scattering properties, and rotation of Mercury. The recent observational program at Arecibo Observatory has been devoted primarily to the measurement of altimetric profiles using the delay-Doppler technique. These profiles, which were derivedfrom observations made over a 6 yr period, provide fairly e...

Precise corrections with a three-dimensional voxel model of the ionosphere based on global navigation satellite system (GNSS) data from a wide-area network of ground receivers can help resolve differential carrier-phase ambiguities over very long baselines of hundreds of kilometers in present two-frequency systems [global positioning system (GPS) and global orbiting navigation satellite system ...