Michel Guerra (isardSAT) presented the poster ‘Ocean swell parameters retrieval using Sentinel-6 FF-SAR spectra’ in the 30 Years of Progress in Radar Altimetry Symposium (30YPRA), that took place in Montpellier, from the 2nd to the 7th of September of 2024.
The poster presented a methodology to extract swell parameters from Sentinel-6 radar altimeter data at thousands of kilometres away from storm surges using fireworks data from CFOSAT. The data was processed with an Omega-K (WK) algorithm and submitted to spectral analysis to retrieve the parameters. Along-track swell retrievals obtained better results than across-track.
Swell propagation from storm surges
To detect swell wavelength using altimetry data from Sentinel-6 Poseidon-4 altimeter, swell is isolated using a third-party validated source: CFOSAT-SWIM fireworks vectors grid (ovl.oceandatalab.com). Parallelly, Sentinel-6 tracks are selected by co-location with this data along the swell direction.