SATELLITE ALTIMETER DATA FILTERING AND SMOOTHING IN THE COURSE OF GROUND-BASED RETRACKING

Abstract

Introduction. Satellite radar altimeter is an essential part of the Earth remote sensing space missions. Satellite altimeter on-board delay-lock loop, by a widely shared concept, is operationally just a tool of a reliable retaining of received echo-signal within the tracking window, while “fine” altimetric parameter (orbit height, significant wave height, scattering cross section per unit of a probed surface, etc.) measuring is committed to the ground-based retracking of data. In particular, in the course of retracking altimeter data are being filtered and/or smoothed.Objective. The paper subject is study of retracking algorithms of altimeter data transmitted from the space vehicle to the ground segment.Methods and materials. It is known that data filtering already presents on-board the space vehicle and is implemented in delay-lock loop based on the α–β-filter. However, at the stage of ground-based retracking it seems more appropriate to use the Kalman filter, which possesses a number of theoretical optimal features and is efficient as for utilization of the available computational resource.Results and conclusions. In the paper implementation of filtering and smoothing via Kalman algorithm is described. On the ground of computer simulation data it is stated that Kalman filtering and smoothing make estimate accuracy two and more times higher depending on significant wave height.

Keywords

• satellite altimeter
• retracking
• kalman filter
• smoothing