Coastal Altimetry: A Promising Technology for the Coastal Oceanography Community DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.5772/intechopen.89373

waveform classification was carried out by Berry et al. [16]. They set up an expertise system to classify the ERS-1 geodetic mission waveforms over ocean, coast, ice, desert, forest, and land. Their interests lied in the land and forest and their objective was to set up a digital elevation model (DEM) with accuracy from one meter (over plain or desert) to several meters (over plateau).

The official Envisat altimeter ground segment classifies the waveform into four types: ocean, ice sheet, glacier, and sea ice. There is no coastal-oriented retracker, but coastal waveforms are regarded as certain ice types. PISTACH product classifies the waveform into 16 classes, including a "doubt" class (see Figure 2). For each class, a certain retracker is assigned [15].

Maybe the most complex classification strategy is the one carried out by Schwatek et al. [17]. They classified the waveform into more than 50 classes. Even over the open ocean they have a dozen of classes. It may be somewhat unnecessarily complicated. Anyway, waveform classification and retracking should be a complete suite of solution for waveform processing.
