Applying Satellite Altimetry to Wetland Water Levels Monitoring (Case Study: Louisiana Wetland)

The idea of the application of satellite radar altimetry for inland water study has been considered for about two decades. It has always been much challenging, because the returned signal from inland water, in comparison to the ocean one, is very different. Thus the onboard satellite processing unit would not be able to determine the exact tracking point. Therefore, the execution of waveform re-tracking is efficient to correct the presented Range. The purpose of this letter is the application of the three of waveform re-tracking methods, namely OCOG, NASA β and Threshold and known as common methods, in order to monitor the Louisiana wetland water level. The validation is done by calculating the Correlation coefficient between the satellite altimetry and the tide gauge observations. The correlation coefficient has calculated between the two time series made from tide gauge data and satellite data. The coefficient value without exerting re-tracking is 0.4758 and with re-tracking is 0.6462. Numerical results shows, accuracy of water level monitoring increase up to 35.81% by the waveform re-tracking execution. In addition the results of all methods are compared with each other.

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