Digital Elevation Models of Some Land Surfaces from Interferometric Processing of Swot Images

Damien Desroches, Nicolas Gasnier

Abstract: The KaRIn interferometric altimeter, which is the main instrument of the SWOT mission has been designed to map the topography of water surfaces. While its operating principle is similar to that of previous SAR interferometers such as SRTM or TanDEM-X, its characteristics have been adapted to its purpose: near-nadir incidence to get a strong signal on water surfaces at the expense of land surfaces, small baseline, and Ka-Band wavelength. Despite this, SWOT images show a good coherence on certain types of land surfaces such as sand dunes and early results of topographic processing of SWOT data on these surfaces are very promising. For instance, this could enable new ways to monitor dune migration through SWOT’s high temporal revisit and vertical accuracy.

External IDs:dblp:conf/igarss/DesrochesG24