A maximum bathymetric depth model to simulate satellite photon-counting lidar performance

Abstract With the development of photon-counting sensors, spaceborne photon-counting lidars have shown many advantages in mapping underwater topography. Although a space based lidar is normally a profiling system, the depth penetration and the vertical accuracy achieved with a bathymetric lidar is superior to imagery (that only provides relative depths). Therefore, many satellite derived bathymetry products use both active/passive spaceborne data to achieve spatial coverage as well as absolute depth measurements. Compared with shipborne and airborne bathymetric systems, satellite derived bathymetry data can have a global coverage, especially covering some remote areas where airborne/shipborne systems are hard or very expensive to reach. In this paper, a theoretical model is proposed to quantitatively analyze the maximum bathymetric depth of a satellite photon-counting lidar, which considers the system parameters, environmental effects, and the constraint of the SNR (signal to noise ratio). System parameters of ICESat-2 (Ice, Cloud, and land Elevation Satellite-2) as well as the MODIS (Moderate-resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer) and NCEP (National Centers for Environmental Prediction) datasets are used to provide systematic and environmental inputs to the model, and the ICESat-2 actual bathymetric data are used to verify the maximum depth estimated by the proposed model. In six different sites with different water qualities, solar angles and wind speeds, the theoretical maximum bathymetric depths agree well with the actually achieved ICESat-2 lidar depths, in terms of MAE (mean absolute error) of 0.50 m and the RMSE (root mean square error) of 0.60 m. The errors in all study areas are within 14% of the corresponding maximum depths. Additionally, the non-linear response of a photon-counting lidar, independent parameter impacts on the theoretical model, and the errors in the experimental process were quantitatively analyzed. In the future, this theoretical model can be used to evaluate the maximum bathymetric depth for a bathymetry investigation when applying system parameters and environmental parameters. In addition, it can be used to optimize the hardware parameters of a photon-counting lidar in its early design process.