volume | PIER Journals

Abstract

Doppler-based techniques for ocean current measurement have been demonstrated in the past years. The Doppler shift of the ocean backscattering from space-borne microwave instruments not only includes the contributions from ocean current but also includes satellite movement and the wind-wave induced. Geometrical Doppler shift induced by satellite movement is highly dependent on the accuracies of satellite attitude determinations and speed. In this study, we derive the detailed formulas to investigate how satellite attitude determination and speed errors affect ocean current retrieval for a Doppler scatterometer through the spatial correlation coefficient phase and the transformation between orbital coordinate system and satellite-carried local level frame (LLF). Our results show that ocean current speed retrieval accuracy is sensitive to the accuracies of satellite attitude determination and speed, and compared with the satellite speed error, satellite attitude error has a larger impact on ocean current retrieval. By comparisons, with the same attitude accuracy for satellite roll, pitch, and yaw, ocean current speed error induced by the roll error is found to be the smallest. With an accuracy of 0.001° satellite attitude determination and 0.01 m/s for satellite speed accuracy, the total ocean current speed retrieval error induced by satellite attitude determinations (including roll, pitch, and yaw) and speed errors reaches a maximum value of 16.37 cm/s at side-looking direction and a minimum value of 11.05 cm/s at forward and backward-looking directions. Our results confirm the importance of satellite attitude determination accuracy for future ocean current mission and will also be useful to motivate the design of future Doppler measurement instruments.

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Ms. Yuanjing Miao

Dr. Xiaolong Dong

Dr. Di Zhu