Sea Surface Height Estimation from Improved Modified, and Decontaminated Sub-Waveform Retracking Methods over Coastal Areas

Coastal zones are challenging areas for sensing by satellite altimeters because reflected signals from non-water surfaces and from calm sea surfaces in small bays and ports inside the radar footprint lead to erroneous powers in return waveforms. Accordingly, these contaminated waveforms do not follow the so-called Brown model in conventional retracking algorithms and fail to derive qualified ranges. Consequently, the estimated water level is erroneous as well. Therefore, selecting an optimized retracker for post-processing waveforms is significantly important to achieve a qualified water level estimation. To find the optimized retracker, we employed a methodology to minimize the effect of erroneous powers on retracked range corrections. To this end, two new approaches were presented, one based on a waveform decontamination method and the other based on a waveform modification method. We considered the first meaningful sub-waveforms in the decontaminated waveforms and in the modified waveforms to be processed with a threshold retracker. To assess their performance, we also retracked the decontaminated and modified full-waveforms. The first meaningful sub-waveform and full-waveform in the original waveforms were retracked to compare the performance of the modified and decontaminated waveform retracking with the original waveform retracking. To compare the results of our sub-waveform retracking algorithms with those of external sub-waveform retracking algorithms, the (Adaptive Leading Edge Sub-waveform) ALES database was also used. In our retracking scenarios, we used the Sentinel-3A SRAL Altimeter to estimate the water levels over the study area within 10 km from the coastlines in both the Persian Gulf and the Bay of Biscay from June 2016 to October 2020. The water levels from processing L2 products were estimated as well. We evaluated our retracking scenarios and L2, as well as the ALES processing results, against the tide gauges. Our analysis showed that within 0–10 km from the coast, the first meaningful sub-waveform of the decontaminated waveforms had the best performance. We reached maximum RMS improvements in this scenario of 53% and 86% over the Persian Gulf and the Bay of Biscay, respectively, in comparison with L2 processing. Over these distances from the coast, the first sub-waveform from the original waveforms and the modified waveforms stayed in the second and third order of performance. The ALES database with an RMS ranging from 13 to 51 cm had a worse performance than all of our sub-waveform retracking scenarios.