Improving Sentinel-3 SAR Mode Processing Over Lake Using Numerical Simulations

Access to fresh water is a key issue for the next decades in the context of global warming. The water level of lakes is a fundamental variable that needs to be monitored for this purpose. The radar altimetry constellation brings a worldwide means to this question. Recent advances in radar altimeter onboard tracking modes have allowed monitoring thousands of lakes and rivers. Now, measurements are widely available with better resolution: it is time to drastically improve the processing. The altimetry waveforms over lakes are difficult to analyze and very different from the ocean ones. We face a large variety of signals due to surface roughness, lake geometry, and environment. The inversion process, named retracking, shall be able to describe all these components. We propose here a retracking based on physical simulations taking as inputs the lake contour and the instrument characteristics. Fitting the simulation on the waveforms gives the water surface height. The algorithm has been tested on the Sentinel-3A and Sentinel-3B time series over Occitan reservoirs (France) and Swiss lakes and compared to
in situ
references. Over small Occitan reservoirs (few ha to few km
²
), the unbiased root-mean-square error (ub-RMSE) is better than 14 cm. Over the medium-size Swiss lakes, the ub-RMSE is better than 10 cm for most of them.