A new tracker for ocean-land compatible radar altimeter

Satellite radar altimeter is an active microwave remote sensor for obtaining ocean topography, as well as the marine and land ice mass fluxes at a global scale. Because the echo properties of ocean, land and pole ice are very different, the on-board tracker of radar altimeter should have the ability to handle the distinct signals automatically. In this paper, a new tracker for ocean land compatible, the model compatible tracker (MCT), is proposed. In MCT, two track algorithms, MLE (Maximum likelihood Estimate) and OCOG (off center of gravity), cooperate in parallel. Therefore, not only the good accuracy but also the robustness can be realized in real time on board. So MCT is very suitable for the ocean-land compatible radar altimeter. The principle of MCT, the cooperation strategy for the two algorithms, the adaptive bandwidth technique, and the realization of MCT are discussed in this paper.