Exploiting time and frequency information for delay/Doppler altimetry

Delay/Doppler radar altimetry is a new technology that has been receiving an increasing interest, especially since the launch of Cryosat-2 in 2010, the first altimeter using this technique. The Delay/Doppler technique aims at reducing the measurement noise and increasing the along-track resolution in comparison with conventional pulse limited altimetry. A new semi-analytical model with five parameters has been recently introduced for this new technology. However, two of these parameters are highly correlated resulting in bad estimation performance when estimating all parameters. This paper proposes a new strategy improving estimation performance for delay/Doppler altimetry. The proposed strategy exploits all the information contained in the delay/Doppler domain. A comparison with other classical algorithms (using the temporal samples only) allows to appreciate the gain in estimation performance obtained when using both temporal and Doppler data