Retracing distribution of the sea surface elevations from altimeter return form

The factors that limit the ability to retracing the distribution of sea surface elevation from altimeter return form are considered. It is shown that the current method of calculating the parameters of the distribution can not fully account for the effect of waves on the high ridges of the reflected radio pulses, which in particular leads to an underestimation of the values of skewness obtained by altimetry.