Initial Examination of AltiKa's Individual Echoes

Quartly, GD and Passaro, M 2015 Initial Examination of AltiKa's Individual Echoes. Marine Geodesy, 38 (S1). 73-85. https://doi.org/10.1080/01490419.2014.984882

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Abstract/Summary

The AltiKa altimeter records the reflection of Ka-band radar pulses from the Earth’s surface, with the commonly used waveform product involving the summation of 96 returns to provide average echoes at 40 Hz. Occasionally there are one-second recordings of the complex individual echoes (IEs), which facilitate the evaluation of on-board processing and offer the potential for new processing strategies. Our investigation of these IEs over the ocean confirms the on-board operations, whilst noting that data quantization limits the accuracy in the thermal noise region. By constructing average waveforms from 32 IEs at a time, and applying an innovative subwaveform retracker, we demonstrate that accurate height and wave height information can be retrieved from very short sections of data. Early exploration of the complex echoes reveals structure in the phase information similar to that noted for Envisat’s IEs.

Item Type:	Publication - Article
Additional Information. Not used in RCUK Gateway to Research.:	This is an Accepted Manuscript of an article published by Taylor & Francis in Marine Geodesy on 9 October 2015, available online: http://www.tandfonline.com/10.1080/01490419.2014.984882.
Additional Keywords:	AltiKa altimeter, Ka-band, waveforms, individual echoes, phase analysis,retracking, coherence
Subjects:	Earth Observation - Remote Sensing Space Sciences
Divisions:	Plymouth Marine Laboratory > Science Areas > Earth Observation Science and Applications
Depositing User:	Graham Quartly
Date made live:	11 Nov 2015 10:35
Last Modified:	25 Apr 2020 09:57
URI:	https://plymsea.ac.uk/id/eprint/6692

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