Inland Water Height Estimation Without Ground Control Points for Near-Nadir InSAR Data

Abstract

Surface Water and Ocean Topography (SWOT) is a future wide-swath radar altimetry mission. The main instrument is the Ka-band radar interferometer (KaRIn). It provides interferometric radar images that will be processed to obtain water elevation estimates worldwide. Due to the specific geometric and radiometric characteristics of KaRIn/SWOT, the phase-to-height conversion is one of the most critical processing steps. We propose methods to estimate water heights without using classical approaches based on spatial phase unwrapping and control points. Results obtained on the simulated SWOT data are shown.