Assessing the Altimetric Measurement from CYGNSS Data

• Main Authors: Zuffada, Cinzia, Haines, Bruce, Hajj, George, Li, Zhijin, Lowe, Stephen, Shah, Rashmi, Mashburn, Jake, Axelrad, Penina, O'Brien, Andrew, Cipollini, Paolo, Zavorotny, Valery, Voronovich, Alexander
• Format: Conference Proceeding
• Language: English
• Subjects: Delays; Orbits; Reflection; Scattering; Sea measurements; Sea surface
• ISSN: 2153-7003
• DOI: 10.1109/IGARSS.2018.8518239

The Cyclone Global Navigation Satellite System (CYGNSS) mission was designed to study hurricane intensification by measuring wind speeds in tropical cyclones. However, the delay-Doppler maps (DDM) that are produced can be used to estimate the sea surface height (SSH) at the specular reflection point on the ocean surface. Proof-of-concept studies that DDMs are suitable to solve for SSH have been recently reported (Clarizia et al., 2016; Mashburn et al., 2018), based on data acquired by the demonstration satellite experiment Tech Demo Sat −1 (TDS-1) carrying a GNSS-R receiver similar to the ones onboard CYGNSS. Although the precision of each 1-sec averaged SSH is considerably lower than that of the existing satellite altimeters, by virtue of the dense coverage and frequent revisit time exhibited by the constellation of 8 microsats, the error may be smoothed down considerably by optimal interpolation (Li et al., 2016). Hence the CYGNSS dataset presents a potential opportunity to sample the tropical oceans, and investigate the sensitivity of the SSH measurements to mesoscale eddies.