A Partial Reconstruction Method for SAR Altimeter Coastal Waveforms Based on Adaptive Threshold Judgment

Due to land contamination and human activities, the sea surface height (SSH) data retrieved from altimeter coastal waveforms have poor precision and cannot provide effective information for various tasks. The along-track high-resolution characteristic of the new synthetic aperture radar (SAR) altimeter makes the retracking methods of traditional coastal waveforms difficult to apply. This study proposes a partial reconstruction method for SAR altimeter coastal waveforms. By making adaptive threshold judgments of model matching errors and repairing the contaminated waveforms based on the nearest linear prediction, the success rate of retracking and retrieval precision of SSH are significantly improved. The data from the coastal experimental areas of the Sentinel-3B satellite altimeter are processed. The results indicate that the mean proportion of waveform quality improvement brought by partial reconstruction is 80.30%, the mean retracking success rate of reconstructed waveforms is 85.60%, and the mean increasing percentage is 30.98%. The noise levels of SSH data retrieved by different methods are calculated to evaluate the processing precision. It is shown that the 20 Hz SSH precisions of the original and reconstructed coastal waveforms are 12.75 cm and 6.32 cm, respectively, and the corresponding 1 Hz SSH precisions are 2.85 cm and 1.41 cm, respectively. The results validate that the proposed partial reconstruction method has improved the SSH precision by a factor of two, and the comparison results with mean sea surface (MSS) model data further verify this conclusion.

Automated summary

This study proposes a partial reconstruction method for SAR altimeter coastal waveforms to improve the success rate of retracking and retrieval precision of SSH. The results show that the average proportion of waveform quality improvement brought by partial reconstruction is 80.30%, the mean retracking success rate of reconstructed waveforms is 85.60%, and the mean increasing percentage is 30.98%. The proposed method has improved the SSH precision by a factor of two, as validated by comparison with mean sea surface (MSS) model data.