Coastal bathymetry inversion using SAR-based altimetric gravity data: A case study over the South Sandwich Island

Abstract

The global bathymetry models are usually of low accuracy over the coastline of polar areas due to the harsh climatic environment and the complex topography. Satellite altimetric gravity data can be a supplement and plays a key role in bathymetry modeling over these regions. The Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) altimeters in the missions like CryoSat-2 and Sentinel-3A/3B can relieve waveform contamination that existed in conventional altimeters and provide data with improved accuracy and spatial resolution. In this study, we investigate the potential application of SAR altimetric gravity data in enhancing coastal bathymetry, where the effects on local bathymetry modeling introduced from SAR altimetry data are quantified and evaluated. Furthermore, we study the effects on bathymetry modeling by using different scale factor calculation approaches, where a partition-wise scheme is implemented. The numerical experiment over the South Sandwich Islands near Antarctica suggests that using SAR-based altimetric gravity data improves local coastal bathymetry modeling, compared with the model calculated without SAR altimetry data by a magnitude of 3.55 m within 10 km of offshore areas. Moreover, by using the partition-wise scheme for scale factor calculation, the quality of the coastal bathymetry model is improved by 7.34 m compared with the result derived from the traditional method. These results indicate the superiority of using SAR altimetry data in coastal bathymetry inversion.