Satellite radar altimeters measure the ocean surface height sea level by measuring the time it takes a radar pulse to make a round trip from the satellite to the sea surface and back.
Satellite radar altimeter accuracy.
A radar altimeter ra radio altimeter ralt electronic altimeter or reflection altimeter measures altitude above the terrain presently beneath an aircraft or spacecraft by timing how long it takes a beam of radio waves to travel to ground reflect and return to the craft.
Bathymetry is measurement of the depth of the ocean.
Its microwave radars measure the distance to the sea surface with a precision of 2 cm.
The delay is directly related to the radar frequency so the difference between the two measurements can.
Free electrons in the atmosphere can delay the signal s return affecting the measurement accuracy.
Abstract the unprecedented accuracy of elevations retrieved from the ice cloud and land elevation satellite icesat laser altimeter is investigated and used to characterize the range errors in the environmental satellite envisat and european remote sensing 2 satellite ers 2 radar altimeters over the continental ice sheets.
A series of satellite missions that started with topex poseidon t p in 1992 and continued with jason 1 2001 2013 jason 2 2008 2019 and jason 3 2016 present estimate.
Additionally analysis of the echo amplitude and shape can extract information about the wind speed and wave height respectively.
Figure 1 shows a schematic of the topex poseidon t p satellite altimeter system.
Satellite altimeter radar measurements can be combined with precisely known spacecraft orbits to measure sea level on a global basis with unprecedented accuracy.
This type of altimeter provides the distance between the antenna and the ground directly below it in contrast to a.
An altimeter measures how high something is.