The Inflection-Point Retracking Algorithm: Improved Jason-2 Sea Surface Heights in the Strait of Hormuz

ABSTRACT

In this study, a waveform retracking algorithm based on finding the inflection-point of the waveform is proposed. After two-steps pre-processing procedure, we employ this method for 145 cycles of Jason-2 data for two tracks 81 and 16 over the Strait of Hormuz. Moreover, we obtain the corrected SSH by the common empirical methods namely Offset Centre of Gravity, Beta and Threshold as well as the ALES. We compare the SSH time series from proposed algorithm with those from common empirical methods. Results are validated against three nearby tide-gauges in the case study. The correlation coefficient and RMSE between the corrected SSH and tide-gages data were computed for three distance classes from the coastline: 0∼5, 5∼10 and 10∼15 kilometer. Our method improves the averaged RMSE of raw SSH up to 41%, 41% and 24%, for these classes over track 81 and 51%, 38% and 41% over track 16, respectively. The averaged correlation values of the proposed method indicate 33%, 11% and 2% improvement over track 81 and are 29%, 14% and 3% over track 16 for three distance groups, respectively. Our method leads to slightly better results than the successful ALES method, especially within the range of 0∼5 km.

KEYWORDS:

• ALES
• inflection point
• jason-2
• retracking
• tide-gauge data