Satellite radar altimetry from open ocean to coasts: challenges and perspectives

Stefano Vignudelli; Helen M. Snaith; Florent Lyard; Paolo Cipollini; Fabio Venuti; Florence Birol; Jérôme Bouffard; Laurent Roblou

doi:10.1117/12.694024

28 November 2006 Satellite radar altimetry from open ocean to coasts: challenges and perspectives

Stefano Vignudelli, Helen M. Snaith, Florent Lyard, Paolo Cipollini, Fabio Venuti, Florence Birol, Jérôme Bouffard, Laurent Roblou

Author Affiliations +

Proceedings Volume 6406, Remote Sensing of the Marine Environment; 64060L (2006) https://doi.org/10.1117/12.694024
Event: SPIE Asia-Pacific Remote Sensing, 2006, Goa, India

Abstract

The history of satellite radar altimetry stems from the need to capture a global view of the surface topography of the oceans. As altimeters are specifically designed for global observations, they encounter major problems in coastal regions, such as relatively poor sampling and inaccuracy of the corrections, so measurements are generally discarded. Nevertheless, a global archive of 15 years of raw data from a series of missions is presently available. The huge amount of unused data in coastal regions can be re-analyzed, improved and more intelligently exploited, possibly promoting coastal altimetry to the rank of operational service. This paper outlines the obstacles limiting the use of the data, discusses some areas of improvement, shows the lessons learned from a case-study in the Mediterranean Sea, and shows that the improved coastal altimetry concept can be extended to other regions, e.g. along the coasts of India. This paper also explores the implications of adopting the emerging vision of the Internet infrastructure in the coastal altimetry context: a collection of unstructured information becomes a network of linked data and software, necessary to perform the specialized on-the-fly processing of the raw data to provide ready-to-use geophysical parameters such as sea level and significant wave height.

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Stefano Vignudelli, Helen M. Snaith, Florent Lyard, Paolo Cipollini, Fabio Venuti, Florence Birol, Jérôme Bouffard, and Laurent Roblou "Satellite radar altimetry from open ocean to coasts: challenges and perspectives", Proc. SPIE 6406, Remote Sensing of the Marine Environment, 64060L (28 November 2006); https://doi.org/10.1117/12.694024

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