Advanced paris altimeter based on delay compensation of Doppler Waveforms

Measuring ocean mesoscale variability is one of the main objectives of next generation satellite altimeters. Among the alternative solutions proposed to overcome the limitations of conventional altimeters, the PARIS concept has been proposed, which exploits GNSS signals reflected from the ocean surface and allows performing altimetry along several points simultaneously over a wide swath with sub-decimeter accuracy in spatial scales of 50-100 Km. The present paper proposes to adopt for a PARIS altimeter a multilook unfocused Doppler processing in order to improve height precision and accuracy. The proposed processing concept is a simplified extension to PARIS of the delay/Doppler processing adopted in conventional radar altimetry. The analyses reported in the paper show that, for open access GPS L5 navigation signal, an improvement of height precision up to 30% could be achieved without modifications to the RF front-end.