The CoReH2O end to end simulator: Architecture and simulation results analysis

An assessment of the impacts of the SAR system performance parameters on the Level-2 products quality is here presented for CoReH2O, that is one of the candidate Earth Explorer Core Missions and whose main objective is to estimate the water stored in the snow pack. A sensitivity analysis has been conducted exploiting the end-to-end mission performance simulator that has been developed in the framework of the feasibility studies to provide a tool for the evaluation of the mission performance up to Level-2 products. Simulations have been run for a subset of the SAR system instrumental errors, such as additive noise, radiometric bias and speckle noise. The obtained results allow to verify how the accuracy of the retrieved snow parameters, e.g. the SWE, depends on the quality of the Level-1 data and, as a consequence, on the SAR system performance parameters.