Performance Assessment Of Lake Water Level Estimation From Sentinel-3 Sar Data Over 1000 Lakes And Reservoirs Worldwide

Satellite-based radar altimetry enables the long-term and global monitoring of inland water bodies. Recent progress of these altimeters concerning the tracking and acquisition mode allows to monitor an increasing number of water bodies, including lakes of small size or located in a complex orograhpy environment. As a consequence of these more demanding situations, the current operational radar processing techniques need to get improved in order to provide accurate water level retrievals. A numerical processing technique that simulates the satellite-observed scene was proposed in [1], taking into account all these challenges. In this work, the performance of such processing technique is assessed from Sentinel-3 mission data. It concerns 1000 lakes and reservoirs worldwide with a great variety of situations, looking for the current limits and potential future improvements, including about thirty water bodies with publicly available in-situ measurements allowing to determine the current accuracy attained.