The application of Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) techniques to classical radar altimetry offers the potential for greatly improved Earth surface mapping. This paper provides an overview of the progress of SAMOSA, Development of SAR Altimetry Studies and Applications over Ocean, Coastal zones and Inland waters, an on-going ESA-funded project. The main objective of SAMOSA is to better quantify the improvement of SAR altimetry over conventional altimetry on water surfaces. More specifically, one of the tasks focuses on the reduction of SAR mode data to pulse-limited altimeter data, and a theoretical modelling to characterize the expected gain between high Pulse Repetition Frequency (PRF) reduced SAR mode data and low PRF classical Low-Resolution Mode (LRM) data. To this end, theoretical modelling using the Cramer-Rao bound (CRB) will be used and the results will be compared to previous theoretical estimates [7], using an analysis akin to that in [8].
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