Altimetry

Ph.D. thesis

From conventional to delay/Doppler altimetry

Supervisors

Corinne MAILHES

Jean-Yves TOURNERET

Abstract

For more than twenty years, conventional altimeters like Topex, Poseidon-2 or Poseidon-3, have been delivering waveforms that are used to estimate many parameters such as the range between the satellite and the observed scene, the wave height and the wind speed. Several waveform models and estimation processing have been developed for the oceanic data in order to improve the quality of the estimated altimetric parameters. Moreover, a great effort has been devoted to process coastal echoes in order to move the altimetric measurements closer to the coast. In my thesis, I was interested in resolving these two problems, i.e., processing coastal waveforms and improving the quality of the estimated oceanic parameters. The first part of the study considers the problem of coastal waveforms and proposes a new altimetric model taking into account the possible presence of peaks affecting altimetric echoes. In a second part of our work, we have been interested in the delay/Doppler altimetry. This new technology aims at reducing the measurement noise and increasing the along-track resolution when compared to conventional altimetry. Two altimetric models have been developed in order to estimate the resulting delay/Doppler echoes. These models allow a clear improvement in parameter estimation when compared to conventional altimetry.

Data and results

• Processing coastal waveforms avi file [ .avi - 2089Ko ].