Noise accuracy of the joint parameter estimate by a satellite radar altimeter

The study object is a space-based radar altimeter. The modern satellite altimeters along with the instant distance to an earth surface measure sea wave height and scattering cross section per unit of a probed spot. Ranking specific measuring algorithms may be based on comparison of their accuracy indicators with the reference being the minimum theoretical estimate variance established by the Cramer-Rao bound. Calculation of such bounds in the case of joint estimate comes down to inversion of the Fisher information matrix. In the paper this task is solved within the framework of Gaussian approximation of both compressed ranging pulse and antenna pattern. As a result expressions for noise variances of joint estimates of satellite height, significant wave height and power SNR are obtained. Quantifying the received equations into figures is implemented by the numerical integration.