Calibration of the CryoSat-2 Interferometer and Measurement of Across-Track Ocean Slope

This paper describes the calibration of the CryoSat-2 interferometer, whose principal purpose is to accurately measure the height of the Antarctic and Greenland ice sheets. A sequence of CryoSat-2 data acquisitions over the tropical and midlatitude oceans were obtained between June and September 2010, from the SIRAL “A” and redundant SIRAL “B” radars operating in their “SARIN” mode, during a sequence of satellite rolls between -0.6° and 0.4°. Using the arrival angle of the echo relative to the interferometer baseline, the attitude of the satellite determined by the star trackers, and estimates of the ocean surface across-track slope from the EGM08 geoid, we determined the errors in the interferometer estimate of surface slope as functions of the roll angle and ocean surface waveheight. These were found to be in close agreement with the theoretical description. The scale factor of the interferometric measurement of angle was determined to be 0.973 ± 0.002. We estimate the accuracy of the across-track slope measurement of the interferometer by applying this scale factor to the measured phase. In applying this scale factor to the measurements, the across-track slope of the marine geoid was obtained with an accuracy of 26 μrad at 10 km and 10 μrad at 1000 km. We conclude that the instrument performance considerably exceeds that needed for the accurate determination of height over the sloping surfaces of the continental ice sheets. The results also demonstrate that CryoSat-2 provides the first observations of the instantaneous vector gradient of the ocean surface, and that the normal-incidence interferometric configuration has a greater potential for the measurement of the ocean across-track slope than has been previously recognized.