Abstract
This paper provides an overview of the Dragon 4 project dealing with operational monitoring of sea ice and sea surface salinity (SSS) and new product developments for altimetry data. To improve sea ice thickness retrieval, a new method was developed to match the Cryosat-2 radar waveform. Additionally, an automated sea ice drift detection scheme was developed and tested on Sentinel-1 data, and the sea ice drifty capability of Gaofen-4 geostationary optical data was evaluated. A second topic included implementation and validation of a prototype of a Fully-Focussed SAR processor adapted for Sentinel-3 and Sentinel-6 altimeters and evaluation of its performance with Sentinel-3 data over the Yellow Sea; the assessment of sea surface height (SSH), significant wave height (SWH), and wind speed measurements using different altimeters and CFOSAT SWIM; and the fusion of SSH measurements in mapping sea level anomaly (SLA) data to detect mesoscale eddies. Thirdly, the investigations on the retrieval of SSS include simulations to analyse the performances of the Chinese payload configurations of the Interferometric Microwave Radiometer and the Microwave Imager Combined Active and Passive, SSS retrieval under rain conditions, and the combination of active and passive microwave to study extreme winds.
Highlights
The ocean, which covers 71% of the earth’s surface, is an important component of the global climate system
Publications are available for research tasks related to objectives O1.2 and O1.3. Since those studies could not be carried out jointly as a Sino-European project, results are not described here in detail. They are indicated with the conclusions
Starting with Sentinel-3 performance, the results show that the accuracy of wind speed (WS) and significant wave height (SWH) data derived by the Sentinel-3 satisfy their mission requirements
Summary
The ocean, which covers 71% of the earth’s surface, is an important component of the global climate system. Ocean satellite monitoring (including frozen regions, i.e., sea ice) is of great significance for observing large-scale spatial and temporal changes of various ocean parameters over long periods of time and for linking them with global climate change. Remote sensing is an important means for continuous monitoring of single ocean regions and the generation of products that provide information about, e.g., regional wind, wave, or sea ice conditions. The European EnviSat, SMOS, CryoSat-2, and Sentinel series satellites, as well as the Chinese Haiyang series and CFOSAT satellite, provide a large amount of remote sensing data for ocean and sea ice monitoring. The cooperation between Chinese and European scientists on utilizing different remote sensing sensor and data processing technologies helps to trigger a more comprehensive application of the different types of Earth Observation (EO) satellite data for ocean monitoring. As a continuation and expansion of Dragon 3 projects (No 10501 [1,2] and No 10466 [3]), the Dragon 4 project No 32292
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