Coastal observation of sea surface tide and wave height using opportunity signal from Beidou GEO satellites: analysis and evaluation

In this paper, the methods retrieving tide and SWH using reflected BeiDou GEO satellite signals are proposed, and a data-driven method is proposed to calibrate sea state bias of the retrieved tide. In addition, an estimator combining multi-satellite observation based on linear unbiased minimum variance (LUMV) is developed to improve the retrieved precision. The B1I signal experiments in Qingdao and Shenzhen show after calibrating sea state influence using the proposed method, the root-mean-square error (RMSE) could fall to 0.40 m from 0.45 m, and compared to the single-satellite observation, the multi-satellite observation based on the LUMV estimator could significantly reduce the RMSE of the retrieved tide to 0.16 m. Shenzhen experiment is also used to evaluate the performance of retrieving SWH and the determination coefficient of 0.60 is obtained. This paper also conducts Monte Carlo simulation and experiment to evaluate the altimetry and measuring SWH precision using reflected B3I signal. The simulated results when SNR is over 5 dB, incoherent averaging number is 10000, and the receiver bandwidth is over 45 MHz, the estimated precision of the delay can reach up ∼ 0.15 m, and the precision of the normalized area ranges from 0.2 to 0.3 m. The B3I experiment show that compared to B1I signal, when the reflected signal from individual satellite is used, the better precision with the RMSE of 0.25 can be obtained, and when combining the measurements from the three satellites using LUMV estimator, the RMSE reduces to 0.16 m. Further, the precision of 0.12 m can be obtained by calibrating the sea state influence.