Coastal Waveform Retracking for HY-2B Altimeter Data by Determining the Effective Trailing Edge and the Low Noise Leading Edge

Abstract

As an important remote sensing technology, satellite altimetry provides a large amount of observations of sea surface height over the global ocean. In coastal areas, the accuracy of satellite altimetry data decreases greatly due to issues arise in the vicinity of land, related to poorer geophysical corrections and artifacts in the altimeter reflected signals linked to the presence of land within the instrument footprint. To improve the application of HY-2B altimetry data in coastal areas, this study proposes a coastal waveform retracking strategy for HY-2B altimetry mission, which depends on the effective trailing edge and the leading edge, which are less affected by coastal ‘contamination’, to retrieve accurate waveform information. The HY-2B pass 323 and pass 196 data are reprocessed, and the accuracy of the reprocessing results in the range of 0–40 km offshore is validated against the tide gauge data and compared with the HY-2B standard SGDR data. According to the analysis conclusion, the accuracy of the reprocessed data is higher than that of the SGDR data and has good performance within 15 km offshore. For the pass 323, the mean value of correlation coefficient and RMS of the reprocessed data against the corresponding tide gauge data are 0.893 and 45.1 cm, respectively, in the range within 0–15 km offshore, and are 0.86 and 33.6 cm, respectively, in the range beyond 15 km offshore. For the pass 196, the mean value of correlation coefficient and RMS of the reprocessed data against the corresponding tide gauge data in the range within 0–12 km offshore are 0.84 and 33.0 cm, respectively, and in the range within 0–5 km offshore to the island are 0.90 and 29.3 cm, respectively, and in the range beyond 5 km offshore to the island are 0.92 and 36.2 cm, respectively, which are all better than the corresponding values of the SGDR data, especially in the range closed to the land. The results indicate that the proposed coastal waveform retracking strategy for HY-2B altimetry greatly improves the quality of HY-2B altimetry data in coastal areas.