EnviSat altimetry for river and lakes monitoring

Satellite radar altimetry has been used for many years to monitor the world´s largest inland waterbodies [1]. As the global in-situ network of gauge stations progressively falls out of use, whilst demands on water resources escalate [2], the importance of a remote measurement capability continues to increase. This paper presents an analysis of the Ku band echoes over inland water, with a global analysis of the contribution of the EnviSat RA-2 to inland water height measurement, showing that 15,067 height time series have successfully been retrieved. Analysis of the samples of unaveraged echoes that are available at 1800Hz demonstrates that the higher Pulse Repetition Frequency allows successful measurement of smaller water surfaces, illustrating the future potential of Sentinel-3 for inland water measurement.