Measuring Significant Wave Height fields in two dimensions at kilometric scales with SWOT

The Surface Water and Ocean Topography (SWOT) mission is primarily designed to measure Sea Surface Height in two dimensions at an unprecedented resolution thanks to its innovative Ka-band radar interferometer KaRIn. In addition to the topography measurements derived from the phase difference between the images acquired at each of the two antennas separated by 10 meters, KaRIn can also provide information about the sea state, by exploiting the measured power in each of the SAR images and the interferometric correlation between both acquisition channels.

This last quantity, sometimes referred to as interferometric coherence, is directly affected by the presence of surface waves. This provides a fantastic opportunity to measure, for the first time at a global scale, Significant Wave Height at kilometric resolutions (well below the reach of nadir altimeters) and in two dimensions. This, however, requires estimating all other sources of decorrelation of instrumental origin with an exquisite precision to avoid misinterpreting instrumental effects as geophysical signals.

In this talk, I will briefly describe how the interferometric acquisitions by KaRIn are calibrated and processed to obtain SWH maps in 2D at various km-scale resolutions (typically 2x2 km or 5x5 km), and discuss how the accuracy at which we need to estimate all the other sources of decorrelation varies with cross-track distance and actual SWH to highlight the most challenging regimes for the inversion. I will then present comparisons between the KaRIn two-dimensional SWH measurements and several independent sets of validation data, including data from SWOT’s nadir altimeter, from the SAR nadir altimeter on-board Sentinel-3, from MASS’s lidar, and from in-situ data. I will finish by discussing various physical features that can be observed in the retrieved SWH fields to illustrate that the high resolution and the two-dimensional character of SWOT measurements really open the door to the quantitative study of the processes that contribute to sea-state variations at small scales.