BRAT @ Living Planet 2016

 The Broadview Altimetry Toolbox will be at the ESA Living Planet Symposium 2016 in Prague (http://lps16.esa.int/index.php). There we will unveil the new toolbox (still in its beta version) and give a first taste of its potential.

You can check out the new functionalities at the session Toolboxes 1, on the 2nd day at 9:00, in South Hall III (http://lps16.esa.int/page_session26.php#155p), or at the EO Science Stand demonstration, at 9:45 of the last day, in the Exhibitors Area.

Please come and visit us!

Toolbox

The Broadview Radar Altimetry Toolbox is a tool designed to use radar altimetry data. It is available in 32-bit and 64-bit versions for Windows, Mac OS X and Linux (Debian 7). The Broadview Radar Altimetry Tutorial and Toolbox is a joint project between ESA and CNES to develop an open source tool (LGPL-3) freely available to all the altimetry community.

The toolbox is able to:

• read all altimetry data from official data centres, from ERS-1 and 2, Topex/Poseidon, Geosat Follow-on, Jason-1, Envisat, Jason-2, Cryosat and Sentinel-3, from Sensor Geophysical Data Record to gridded merged data

• process and manipulate altimetry data

• visualise the results

New SAR Altimetry Tutorial

The Delay Doppler/SAR altimeter differs from a conventional radar altimeter in that it exploits coherent processing of groups of transmitted pulses. It is not pulse-limited like classical radar altimeters, so the full Doppler bandwidth is exploited to make the most efficient use of the power reflected from the surface.
Delay Doppler/SAR altimeter “stares” at each resolved along-track cell as the radar passes overhead for as long as that particular cell is illuminated. Note that each cell is viewed over a larger fraction of the antenna beam than the pulse-limited; thus more data is gathered, which leads to substantial benefits (e.g. it uses most of the power received).
The Delay Doppler/SAR altimetry processes the data such that they could be seen as having been acquired from a synthetic aperture antenna. This along track processing increases resolution and offers a multilook processing with the two independent dimensions: along-track and across-track (range).

The Delay Doppler/SAR mode altimeter offers many potential improvements over conventional altimetry for measurements over the oceans, coastal zones and inland waters using retrackers adapted to the specific nature of Delay Doppler/SAR altimeter echoes.
Cryosat-2 operates a Delay Doppler/SAR mode altimeter, and the recently launched Sentinel-3 mission has SAR for nominal mode of acquisition.

The Altimetry Tutorial has been expanded, now including a new section solely dedicated to this new mode of altimeter operation (http://www.altimetry.info/radar-altimetry-tutorial/sar-tutorial/).