Recovery Of Short Wavelength Geophysical Signals With Future Delay-Doppler Altimeters (Cryosat Ii And Sentinel Type)

A number of geophysical phenomena in the open ocean are still unresolved by conventional 1 Hz altimetry, but could be observed through the potential improvements offered by SAR, or Delay-Doppler (DD), altimetry. The DD altimeter offers the following benefits with respect to conventional satellite altimetry: Factor of 20 improvements in along track resolution. An along-track footprint length that does not vary with wave height (sea state). Twice the precision in sea surface height measurements / sea surface slope measurements. These improvements are studied with respect to retrieval of short wavelength geophysical signal related to mainly bathymetric features. The combination of upward continuation from the sea bottom and smoothing the altimeter observations resulted in the best recovery of geophysical signal for simulated 5-Hz DD observations. Simulations carried out in this investigation indicate, that if the Cryosat-II mission meets the mission goals, the possibility of recovering a huge number of geophysical signal not currently mapped and the possibility to recover global gravity to an accuracy of up to twice that known today from conventional satellite altimetry.