Performance of SARAL/AltiKa satellite altimetry mission over the Strait of Malacca and the South China Sea

Abstract

Satellite altimetry faces challenges when attempting to monitor sea surface heights (SSHs) in coastal zones due to the rapid changes in sea state and land contamination within altimeter footprints. This leads to the lack of high resolution and data quality observations, thus creating a significant gap in the data availability over the coast. A new generation of SARAL/AltiKa satellite altimetry mission with Ka-band promises a significant refinement of coastal altimetry data and provides unprecedented level of ocean SSH data as close as 10 km from the coastline. In this paper, selective passes of SARAL/AltiKa over the Strait of Malacca and the South China Sea were chosen to examine the performance of SSH data quality over the coast, and relatively compared with Jason-2 satellite altimetry mission.