Year: 2025
Type: article
Abstract: Doppler scatterometers have demonstrated the ability to measure wide-swath ocean surface currents from airborne platforms. Since platform velocities for spaceborne platforms are almost two orders of magnitude larger, errors in the knowledge of the pointing of the radar antenna result in ocean current errors also two orders of magnitude larger, and this presents a major challenge to achieving useful measurements of ocean currents. Here, we present a new calibration method to estimate pointing biases that allows the removal of the dominant pointing errors and allowing the retrieval of global ocean currents with modest requirements on the system stability. The calibration method can be implemented in ground processing and does not impact the processing of onboard data. We illustrate the performance of the calibration on the performance of the proposed NASA/CNES ODYSEA Doppler scatterometer and assess its ability to meet the mission science goals.
Source: Remote Sensing
DOI: 10.3390/rs17203486
Authors: Ernesto Rodriguez, Hector Torres, Alexander Wineteer, Antoine Blondel, Clement Ubelmann
Institutions: California Institute of Technology, Jet Propulsion Laboratory
Language: English
Subfield: Oceanography
Field: Earth and Planetary Sciences
Domain: Physical Sciences
Open Access status: gold
Estimated APC paid: $3,258
OpenAlex ID: W4415357424