Tiangong-2 Interferometric Imaging Radar Altimeter Research Articles

Seafloor Topography Recovery Using the Observation Data of Tiangong-2 Interferometric Imaging Radar Altimeter

Tens of years of altimetry sea surface height (SSH) data has continuously contributed to the development of global seafloor topography models because it can be used to precisely retrieve the gravity variation caused by seafloor topography. The development and application of altimeter has come to a new era from conventional nadir-looking altimeters to interferometric wide-swath altimeters as the successful launch of the Interferometric Imaging Radar Altimeter on board Chinese Tiangong 2 space laboratory (TG2 InIRA). Compared with conventional altimeters, the observation efficiency of TG2 InIRA has been greatly improved. This paper presents for the first time the results of seafloor topography derived from TG2 InIRA data in west Pacific Ocean and South China Sea regions. The root mean squared errors (RMSE) of the recovered topographies by gravity-geologic method (GGM) referring to the shipborne measurements in these two regions are 69.882 and 50.110 m, respectively. The recovered topographies are also evaluated by comparing with five well-known topography models. Furthermore, two subareas in west Pacific Ocean region are selected to conduct a supplemental experiment showing that more revisits can help achieve better recovery. The RMSE of the more revisited subarea is 66.808 m, while the RMSE of the less revisited subarea is 79.273 m.

The performance of Tiangong-2 InIRA in gravity anomaly recovery from fused conventional nadir-observing altimeter data

Satellite altimetry has emerged as the primary data source for deriving marine gravity, owing to advancements in satellite altimetry technologies. The Tiangong-2 interferometric imaging radar altimeter (TG2 InIRA) is a new generation wide-swath altimeter (WSA) launched by China on 15 September 2016. TG2 InIRA employs a short-baseline interferometry measurement method at a small incidence angle, thereby enabling the precise measurement of wide-swath sea surface heights (SSHs). The present study demonstrates the efficacy of utilizing data from the TG2 InIRA in conjunction with data from the CryoSat-2 (CS2) satellite to recover marine gravity anomalies. In the Northwest Pacific region (15°N ∼ 25°N, 140°E ∼ 150°E), the TG2 InIRA data were filtered to a 2 km × 2 km grid and any anomalous values were excluded using a mean sea surface model. Deflections of the vertical (DOVs) were calculated using the remove-restore technique, and the inverse Vening-Meinesz formula was applied to invert the gravity anomaly. A power spectral density analysis was conducted to assess variations in gravity anomalies at ship locations in the frequency domain. The results, based on the SIO V31.1 (DOV) model, indicate that the gridded vertical deflections derived from CS2 and TG2 InIRA data achieve more balanced accuracy in the east–west and north–south directions. The integration of TG2 InIRA and CS2 data yielded gravity results exhibiting a root mean square (RMS) of 0.519 mGal lower than those derived from TG2 InIRA data alone, and 0.034 mGal lower than those derived from CS2 data. These findings were derived from shipborne gravity data. Furthermore, the inversion of gravity anomalies from TG2 InIRA demonstrated an enhanced capability in the reduction of high-frequency gravity noise.

Performance of Tiangong-2 Interferometric Imaging Radar Altimeter on Marine Gravity Recovery Over the South China Sea

Performance of Tiangong-2 Interferometric Imaging Radar Altimeter on Marine Gravity Recovery Over the South China Sea

Interferometric Calibration Based on a Constrained Evolutionary Algorithm without Ground Control Points for a Tiangong-2 Interferometric Imaging Radar Altimeter

The interferometric imaging radar altimeter (InIRA), mounted on the Tiangong-2 space laboratory, utilizes a small incidence and a short interferometric baseline to achieve altimetry for wide swathes of ocean surface topography and inland water surface elevation. To obtain a high-precision digital elevation model (DEM), calibration of the interferometric system parameters is necessary. Because InIRA utilizes the small-incidence interference system design, serious coupling occurs between the interferometric parameters. Commonly used interferometric calibration methods tend to fall into the local optimal solution for InIRA. Because evolutionary algorithms have a stronger robustness and global search ability, they are better suited to handling the solution space structure under the coupling of complex interferometric parameters. This article establishes an interferometric calibration optimization model for InIRA by utilizing the relative flatness of the lake surface as an inequality constraint. Furthermore, an adaptive penalty coefficient constraint evolutionary algorithm is designed to solve the model. The proposed method was tested on actual InIRA data, and the results indicate that it efficiently adjusts interferometric parameters, enhancing the precision of measurements for Qinghai Lake elevation.

Preliminary Results of Marine Gravity Recovery by Tiangong-2 Interferometric Imaging Radar Altimeter

This paper presents for the first time the results of marine gravity recovery using the ocean observation data acquired by Tiangong-2 interferometric imaging radar altimeter (TG2 InIRA) which demonstrate not only the balanced accuracies of the north and east components of deflection of the vertical (DOV) as envisaged, but also the improved spatial resolutions of DOV compared with that by conventional altimeters (CAs). Moreover, much higher measurement efficiency owing to the wide-swath capability and the great potential in accuracy improvement of marine gravity field are also demonstrated. TG2 InIRA adopts the interferometry with short baseline and takes small incidence angles, by which wide-swath sea surface height (SSH) can be measured with high accuracy. Gravity recovery experiments in the Western Pacific area are conducted to demonstrate the performance, advantages and capability of TG2 InIRA. SSH data processing algorithms and DOV calculation have been designed by taking the wide-swath feature into account, based on which, the gravity anomalies are then calculated using the inverse Vening Meinesz formula. The derived gravity anomalies are compared with both the published gravity models and the shipborne gravity measurements. The results show that the accuracy of TG2 InIRA is equivalent to, or even a little better than, that of CAs. The fused gravity result using equal TG2 InIRA data and CAs data performs better than those using TG2 InIRA data alone or CAs data alone. Due to the signal bandwidth of TG2 InIRA is only 40 MHz which is much smaller than that of CAs, much higher accuracy can be hopefully achieved for future missions if larger signal bandwidth is used.

Approaches for Joint Retrieval of Wind Speed and Significant Wave Height and Further Improvement for Tiangong-2 Interferometric Imaging Radar Altimeter

The interferometric imaging radar altimeter (InIRA) adopts a short baseline along with small incidence angles to acquire interferometric signals from the sea surface with high accuracy, thus the wide-swath sea surface height (SSH) and backscattering coefficient (σ0) can be obtained simultaneously. This work presents an approach to jointly retrieve the wind speed and significant wave height (SWH) for the Chinese Tiangong-2 interferometric imaging radar altimeter (TG2-InIRA). This approach utilizes a multilayer perceptron (MLP) joint retrieval model based on σ0 and SSH data. By comparing with the European Center for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts (ECMWF) reanalysis data, the root mean square errors (RMSEs) of the retrieved wind speed and the SWH are 1.27 m/s and 0.36 m, respectively. Based on the retrieved SWH, two enhanced wind speed retrieval models are developed for high sea states and low sea states, respectively. The results show that the RMSE of the retrieved wind speed is 1.12 m/s when the SWHs < 4 m; the RMSE is 0.73 m/s when the SWHs ≥ 4 m. Similarly, two enhanced SWH retrieval models for relatively larger and relatively smaller wind speed regions are developed based on the retrieved wind speed with corresponding RMSEs of 0.19 m and 0.16 m, respectively. The comparison between the retrieved results and the buoy data shows that they are highly consistent. The results show that the additional information of SWH can be used to improve the accuracy of wind speed retrieval at small incidence angles, and also the additional information of wind speed can be used to improve the SWH retrieval. The stronger the correlation between wind speed and SWH, the greater the improvement of the retrieved results. The proposed method can achieve joint retrieval of wind speed and SWH accurately, which complements the existing wind speed and SWH retrieval methods for InIRA.

New Ku-Band Geophysical Model Function and Wind Speed Retrieval Algorithm Developed for Tiangong-2 Interferometric Imaging Radar Altimeter

A Ku-band geophysical model function for wind speed retrieval named as KuLMOD-H is proposed based on the quasi-specular reflection model for the Chinese Tiangong-2 Interferometric Imaging Radar Altimeter (TG2-InIRA), which can be used to retrieve the wind speed with 2 km resolution. The model is derived by expanding the effective nadir reflection coefficient term and the mean square slope term in the quasi-specular reflection model using quadratic polynomials with wind speed as variable. The model coefficients are obtained by fitting the radar backscattering coefficient data from TG2-InIRA to the collocated sea surface wind speed data from European Center for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts (ECMWF). For solving the problem of potential ambiguous solutions when the incidence angles are relatively large, a regularization approach is further proposed. The retrieved wind speed results have a root-mean-square error (RMSE) of 1.42 m/s compared with the collocated ECMWF wind speed data and at the same time, they are highly consistent with the buoy data. Different from the previous works on TG2-InIRA wind speed retrieval, this article derives a semiphysical model suitable for incidence angles from 1 <inline-formula xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"><tex-math notation="LaTeX">$^\circ$</tex-math></inline-formula> to 8 <inline-formula xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"><tex-math notation="LaTeX">$^\circ$</tex-math></inline-formula> , by which better retrieval results are achieved. This work not only explores the wind speed retrieval capability of the instrument under low incidence-angle observation, but also provides high-resolution wind speed data for further correction of sea state bias for TG2-InIRA sea surface height measurements.

Cross-Track Error Correction and Evaluation of the Tiangong-2 Interferometric Imaging Radar Altimeter

The Interferometric Imaging Radar Altimeter (InIRA) carried on the Tiangong-2 Space Laboratory can observe three-dimensional sea surface topography over a swath tens of kilometers wide. The InIRA represents a test mission that will provide valuable experience for the design and data processing technology of future wide-swath altimeters. In addition to the tropospheric delay, ionospheric delay, and sea state bias that affect traditional altimeters, InIRA was also affected by the cross-track error derived from roll error, baseline length error, and interference phase error, which had to be properly corrected. In this paper, range error correction based on correction models and cross-track error correction based on the reference topography data method were applied to a 15-day InIRA dataset and evaluated using the Jason-2, Jason-3, Saral/AltiKa, and Sentinel-3A. The results showed that the standard deviation between corrected InIRA and the combined dataset was 7.96 cm after eliminating the influence of tides and dynamic atmospheric correction, which was comparable to nadir altimeter measurement accuracy.

A Novel Ship Wake Detection Algorithm Based on WTHT and Radon Transform

This paper proposes a novel ship wake detection algorithm based on the White Top-hat Transform (WTHT) and the Radon transform, which aims to improve the contrast between the ship wake and the background so as to improve the detection performance on Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) images. The proposed algorithm includes two major processes, and one is to improve the contrast and another one is to locate the ship wake. In high sea state conditions, the contrast of ship wake and background can be very low, which makes it difficult to detect. In the first step, the proposed contrast improvement algorithm is applied to improving the contrast which helps for improving the detection performance. An attribute filter based on edge detection result is adopted here. In the second step the contrast improved image is transformed into the Radon domain followed by peak extraction process to find the wake, the WTHT is used once more in this step. Finally, in the last step, the wake is overlapped on the original image. Experimental results on Tiangong-2 Interferometric Imaging Radar Altimeter (InIRA) images are presented and compared with that obtained by using the classical algorithm, and in this way, the better performance of our algorithm is demonstrated.

Preliminary Evaluation and Correction of Sea Surface Height from Chinese Tiangong-2 Interferometric Imaging Radar Altimeter

In this study, we performed preliminary comparative evaluation and correction of two-dimensional sea surface height (SSH) data from the Chinese Tiangong-2 Interferometric Imaging Radar Altimeter (InIRA) with the goal of advancing its retrieval. Data from the InIRA were compared with one-dimensional SSH data from the traditional altimeters Jason-2, Saral/AltiKa, and Jason-3. Because the sea state bias (SSB) of distributed InIRA data has not yet been considered, consistency was maintained by neglecting the SSB for the traditional altimeters. The results of the comparisons show that the InIRA captures the same SSH trends as those obtained by traditional altimeters. However, there is a significant deviation between InIRA and traditional altimeter SSHs; consequently, systematic and parametric biases were analyzed. The parametric bias was found to be related to the incidence angles and a significant wave height. Upon correcting the two biases, the standard deviation significantly reduced to 8.1 cm. This value is slightly higher than those of traditional altimeters, which typically have a bias of ~7.0 cm. The results indicate that the InIRA is promising in providing a wide swath of SSH measurements. Moreover, we recommend that the InIRA retrieval algorithm should consider the two biases to improve SSH accuracy.

Correction of the tropospheric slant path delay of Tiangong-2 Interferometric Imaging Radar Altimeter

Correction of the tropospheric slant path delay of Tiangong-2 Interferometric Imaging Radar Altimeter

Non‐uniform phase filter for Tiangong‐2 Interferometric Imaging Radar Altimeter

The interferometric imaging radar altimeter (InIRA) on-board Chinese Tiangong-2 space laboratory is a Ku-band interferometric radar whose major aim is to measure the wide-swath ocean topography. Unlike traditional interferometric synthetic aperture radar (InSAR) aiming at measuring digital elevation model of land surface, Tiangong-2 InIRA adopts small incidence angles and short baseline to get strong and high coherency reflections from ocean surface. The interferometric phase noise is a notable source of errors which limits the accuracy of the ocean height measurements. Compared with traditional InSAR, the height error of Tiangong-2 InIRA shows different distribution pattern due to the absolutely small but relatively large variation incidence angles. This study gives a filtering method for interferometric phase generated with small incidence angles and short baseline. Non-uniform windows are selected according to the relation between the coherence, imaging geometry, and the height variation. Results on Tiangong-2 InIRA data are analysed by comparing the non-uniform filtering method with traditional multi-looking method.

Improved BAQ algorithm for Tiangong‐2 interferometric imaging radar data compression

Tiangong-2 interferometric imaging radar altimeter (InIRA), the first space-borne radar altimeter in the world, applying a new mechanism of interferometry with short baseline and small incident angle, can achieve wide swath and high accuracy sea surface height measuring. Comparing to traditional altimeter, InIRA can obtain SAR image of observation area, which means InIRA needs higher AD sampling rate. Due to the limitation of satellite on-board storage and downlink speed, in order to extend the working time of InIRA, data compression algorithm for InIRA must be studied. Block adaptive quantisation (BAQ) is an efficient and widely adopted approach for space-borne SAR raw data compression. Based on the characters of InIRA echo waveform, this study discusses compressing InIRA raw data by changing quantisation bits and size of blocks of BAQ algorithm to achieve higher compression ratio and less sea surface height error.