Satellite Altimetry: Achievements and Future Trends by a Scientometrics Analysis

Abstract

Scientometric reviews, facilitated by computational and visual analytical approaches, allow researchers to gain a thorough understanding of research trends and areas of concentration from a large number of publications. With the fast development of satellite altimetry, which has been effectively applied to a wide range of research topics, it is timely to summarize the scientific achievements of the previous 50 years and identify future trends in this field. A comprehensive overview of satellite altimetry was presented using a total of 8541 publications from the Web of Science Core Collection covering the years from 1970 to 2021. We begin by presenting the fundamental statistical results of the publications, such as the annual number of papers, study categories, countries/regions, afflictions, journals, authors, and keywords, in order to provide a comprehensive picture of satellite altimetry research. We discuss the co-occurrence of the authors in order to reveal the global collaboration network of satellite altimetry research. Finally, we utilised co-citation networks to detect the development trend and associated crucial publications for various specific topics. The findings show that satellite altimetry research has been changed immensely during the last half-century. The United States, France, China, England, and Germany made the most significant contributions in the field of satellite altimetry. The analysis reveals a clear link between technology advancements and the trend in satellite altimetry research. As a result, wide swath altimetry, GNSS-reflectometry, laser altimetry, terrestrial hydrology, and deep learning are among the most frontier study subjects. The findings of this work could guide a thorough understanding of satellite altimetry’s overall development and research front.

The Emerging Golden Age of Satellite Altimetry to Prepare Humanity for Rising Seas

“…But, we must not lose sight of the need to maintain and continue the records that have become important both to the science community and society. In particular, the sequence of conventional radar altimeters on the TOPEX/Poseidon orbit has led to a 30‐year record of satellite observations that serve as a foundation for hundreds of scientific studies per year (Yang et al., 2022), and serves as a critical reference for missions in other orbits (Donlon et al., 2021). It also provides a continually updated record of global sea level rise–a critical indicator of human caused climate change.…”

AltiMaP: Altimetry Mapping Procedure for Hydrography Data

“…Although satellite altimetry missions were developed for ocean surface observations, they have increasingly been applied to 110 observe lakes and rivers (Abdalla et al, 2021;Calmant et al, 2008;Calmant and Seyler, 2006;Yang et al, 2022). Several agencies have already processed their original satellite altimetry data and produced data archives for studying WSEs, including the HydroWeb (Crétaux et al, 2011;Santos da Silva et al, 2010), Hydrosat (Tourian et al, 2016(Tourian et al, , 2022, Database for Hydrological Time Series of Inland Waters (DAHITTI; Schwatke et al, 2015), Global Reservoirs and Lakes Monitor (G-REALM; Birkett and Beckley, 2010), Copernicus Global Land Service (CGLS; Calmant et al, 2013;Crétaux et al, 2011), 115 River & Lake (Birkett et al, 2002), Hidrosat (Santos da Silva et al, 2010;da Silva et al, 2012), and Global River Radar Altimetry Time Series (GRRATS; Coss et al, 2020) archives.…”

Artificial Intelligence Techniques for Observation of Earth’s Changes

“…The Copernicus Marine Environment Monitoring Service (CMEMS) offers detailed band-pass filtered data to reduce noise contamination of along-track SSH signals to best address this unresolved issue. Users looking to reveal small-scale altimeter signals are thus left to their own devices to devise more creative and appropriate noise-filtering solutions [49].…”