Water levels in the Amazon basin derived from the ERS 2 and ENVISAT radar altimetry missions |
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Authors: | Joecila Santos da Silva Stephane Calmant Otto Corrêa Rotunno Filho Webe João Mansur |
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Affiliation: | a Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro - UFRJ, Programa de Engenharia Civil - COPPE, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil b Université Toulouse 3 - UT3, UMR 5566 LEGOS CNES/CNRS/IRD/UT3, Toulouse, France and Brasilia, Brazil c Unité ESPACE, US140 IRD, Montpellier, France and Brasilia, Brazil d Université Toulouse 3 - UT3, UMR 5563 LMTG CNRS/IRD/UT3, UMR 5566 LMTG CNRS, Toulouse France and Brasilia, Brazil |
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Abstract: | This study sets out to analyze the stages of water bodies in the Amazon basin derived from the processing of ERS-2 and ENVISAT satellite altimetry data. For ENVISAT, GDR measurements for both Ice-1 and Ice-2 tracking algorithms were tested. For ERS-2, the Ice-2 data produced by the OSCAR project was used. Water level time series over river segments of very different width, from several kilometers to less than a hundred of meters, were studied. The water level time series that can be derived from narrow riverbeds are enhanced by off-nadir detections. Conversely, the off-nadir effect may degrade the series over large bodies if not properly accounted for. Comparison at crossovers and with in situ gauges shows that the quality of the series can be highly variable, from 12 cm in the best cases and 40 cm in most cases to several meters in the worse cases. Cautious data selection is clearly a key point to achieve high quality series. Indeed, low quality series mostly result from inclusion of outliers in the data set finally retained for the computation of the series. Ice-2 and Ice-1 tracking algorithms in the ENVISAT data perform almost equally well. ENVISAT altimetry is clearly an improvement on ERS-2 altimetry. |
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Keywords: | Radar altimetry Uncertainty assessment Time series analysis Ungaged basin Amazon basin |
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