A brief demonstration of a tool for SARAL/AltiKa waveform clustering

Abstract

This article describes a classification tool to cluster SARAL/AltiKa waveforms. The tool was made using Python scripts. Radar altimetry systems (e.g., SARAL/AltiKa) measures the distance from the satellite centre to a target surface by calculating the satellite-to-surface round-trip time of a radar pulse. An altimeter waveform represents the energy reflected by the earth’s surface to the satellite antenna with respect to time. The tool clusters the altimetric waveforms data into desired groups. For the clustering, we used evolutionary minimize indexing function (EMIF) with k-means cluster mechanism. The idea was to develop a simple interface which takes the altimetry waveforms data from a folder as inputs and provides single value (using EMIF algorithm) for each waveform. These values are further used for clustering. This is a simple light weighted tool and user can easily interact with it.