Current Capabilities
LRM Tracks: exemplar Lake Malawi
  • Rift valley lake: substantive terrain variation in surrounding area: good target for prior altimeter missions.
  • Good validation time series from Jason2, therefore identified as CRUCIAL validation test target for height retrieval prior to involvement of river modellers.
  • LRM tracks (Fig. 12) put through expert system tuned for Cryosat-2 LRM waveform shape recognition.
  • High proportion of complex (land/water) multi-target echoes, often associated with snagging on bright targets.
  • Analysis shows very high proportion of complex echoes, multi-target responses, in addition to problems/complexities resembling those from ‘ocean mode’ altimeters.
  • Cryosat2 not returning data over much rough terrain.
 
 
 
 
Figure 14. Lake height for tracks D (upper) and E (lower). Along track variation is the geoid.
 
Figure 15. Power amplitude for tracks D (upper) and E (lower).
Figure 12. LRM tracks across Lake Malawi
Figure 13. Along-track latitude (x-axis) v power (y-axis) for track D (ocean-like waveforms) and track E (complex waveforms). Note fan-tail not seen in previous missions.