CoAuthors

Thomas Moreau (CLS, France); Eduard Makhoul (isardSAT, Spain); Christine Gommenginger (National Oceanography Centre, UK); Mathilde Cancet (Noveltis, France); Luciana Fenoglio-Marc (University of Bonn, Germany); Marc Naeije (TU Delft, Netherlands); M Joana Fernandes (University of Porto, Portugal); Andrew Shaw (SKYMAT, UK); Marco Restano (SERCO / ESRIN, Italy); Américo Ambrózio (DEIMOS / ESRIN, Italy); Jérôme Benveniste (ESA-ESRIN, Italy)

SCOOP (SAR Altimetry Coastal & Open Ocean Performance) is a project funded under the ESA SEOM (Scientific Exploitation of Operational Missions) Programme Element, to characterise the expected performance of Sentinel-3 SRAL SAR mode altimeter products, and then to develop and evaluate enhancements to the baseline processing scheme in terms of improvements to ocean measurements. Another objective was to develop and evaluate an improved Wet Troposphere correction for Sentinel-3.
We report the development and testing of new processing approaches designed to improve performance, including:
• Application of zero-padding
• Application of intra-burst Hamming windowing
• Exact beam forming in the azimuthal direction
• Restriction of stack processing to within a specified range of look angles.
• Along-track antenna compensation
Based on the results of this assessment, a second test data set was generated, processed with zero-adding and hamming windowing, and we present an assessment of the performance of this second Test Data Set, for the open ocean and in the coastal zone, and compare it to that of the original Test Data Set.
Based on the outcomes of this study we provide recommendations for further developments and improvements to existing processing chains.