Deep Learning Denoising of Real SWOT Sea Surface Height Observations

The SWOT (Surface Water Ocean Topography) mission is currently providing unpreceded high-resolution measurements of Sea Surface Height (SSH), revealing ocean features at finer scales. Nevertheless, the two-dimensional observations of KaRIn altimeter of SWOT suffer from instrumental errors. This noise degradation is altering the high frequencies of SWOT signal, and the small to sub-mesoscale dynamics of interest for some oceanographers. For this reason, Tréboutte et al. (2023) have developed a convolutional neural network (CNN) based on U-Net architecture to separate the noise from the physical signals contained in the SSH. Their approach has demonstrated great potential on simulated SWOT measurements, and Dibarboure et al. (2024) report a positive influence on actual flight data from SWOT. However, degraded denoising performance, and occasional negative side-effects have been observed in atypical conditions (e.g. very high surface waves, internal tides solitons). In this study, we illustrate some of these limitations and we present an improved approach of the CNN-based denoising: we modified the training procedure to obtain a more robust version of the algorithm, to avoid biases and artifacts in the denoised SSH. This paper also presents a more complete validation process with a robust and standardized evaluation benchmark: these metrics could be of interest to assess other SWOT filtering and denoising algorithms.