The feasibility of a multibeam delay/Doppler radar altimeter
Shuangbao Yang, Zhisen Wang, Heguang Liu, Ke Xu · Proceedings of SPIE, the International Society for Optical Engineering/Proceedings of SPIE · 2009
Radar altimeter can map the global geoid with high precision. This paper presents a new concept of mutibeam delay/Doppler radar altimeter which combines a liner array of nadir receivers and a nadir transmitter. The delay/Doppler technology is applied in the along track, and the array signal processing technology in the cross track. The key innovation in this concept is that fan-beams form in both along track and across track, and range correction is applied in across track as in along track, so that it could provide high precision with wide swath. But the 3D-matrix store and processing of the raw data from receivers are much more complicated than a conventional radar altimeter and a delay/Doppler radar altimeter. The scheme is of obvious advantages. It could provide height profile with high precision for left scene and right scene, respectively, and leave small footprints at as far range as at near range. It could also lead to uniform cross section in each resolution cell.