Current SAR altimeter processing techniques have principally been optimised and evaluated for water and sea ice surfaces. This leaves several outstanding issues related to the development of SAR processing algorithms for ice sheets to be addressed that are the objective of this study. These are enumerated below:

• the improvement of the waveform retracking procedures required to estimate surface elevation from the detected echo
• the improvement of delay-doppler processing
• the assessment of higher level SAR altimetry products over ice sheets
• and the interaction of the radar wave with snowpack.