SAR ALTIMETRY APPLICATIONS OVER WATER

摘要

The application of Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR)rntechniques to classical radar altimetry offers thernpotential for greatly improved Earth surface mapping.rnThis paper provides an overview of the progress ofrnSAMOSA, Development of SAR Altimetry Studies andrnApplications over Ocean, Coastal zones and Inlandrnwaters, an on-going ESA-funded project. The mainrnobjective of SAMOSA is to better quantify thernimprovement of SAR altimetry over conventionalrnaltimetry on water surfaces. More specifically, one ofrnthe tasks focuses on the reduction of SAR mode data tornpulse-limited altimeter data, and a theoreticalrnmodelling to characterize the expected gain betweenrnhigh Pulse Repetition Frequency (PRF) reduced SARrnmode data and low PRF classical Low-ResolutionrnMode (LRM) data. To this end, theoretical modellingrnusing the Crámer-Rao bound (CRB) will be used andrnthe results will be compared to previous theoreticalrnestimates [7], using an analysis akin to that in [8].