Experiments of sea surface altimetry using reflected GPS signals

In this paper, airborne experiments of sea surface altimetry using reflected Global Positioning System (GPS) signals is presented. The processing of reflected GPS signal is concerned in detail and a new method of noncoherent summation, which can align coherent correlation outputs of the sea surface reflected GPS signals, is proposed. Results show that relative delay estimation of meter level precision can be obtained in one second, and the sea surface height error is expected to be at the same order of magnitude.