Observation of the Mississippi River Surface Gradients from Spire's GNSS-R CubeSats
- Resource Type
- Conference
- Authors
- Wang, Yang; Morton, Y. Jade
- Source
- IGARSS 2022 - 2022 IEEE International Geoscience and Remote Sensing Symposium Geoscience and Remote Sensing Symposium, IGARSS 2022 - 2022 IEEE International. :4403-4406 Jul, 2022
- Subject
- Aerospace
Components, Circuits, Devices and Systems
Computing and Processing
Engineered Materials, Dielectrics and Plasmas
Fields, Waves and Electromagnetics
Geoscience
Photonics and Electrooptics
Power, Energy and Industry Applications
Signal Processing and Analysis
Phase noise
Satellites
Soft sensors
Reflector antennas
Reflection
Rivers
CubeSat
GNSS-R
River Slope
Coherent Reflection
Altimetry
Surface Gradient
- Language
- ISSN
- 2153-7003
Spaceborne global navigation satellite system-reflectometry (GNSS-R) has the potential to provide a new data source for inland water surface observations. In this paper, we present several case studies for the Mississippi River surface gradient observations using the GNSS-R data from Spire's CubeSats. The retrieved river surface slopes are in a range from 2.2 to 16.6 cm/km, and the lower river sections tend to be more flat. Higher phase noise is observed from Spire's GNSS-R data compared previous studies using CY GNSS data. It is likely due to the Spire CubeSat antenna design and the low elevation angles of the reflection signals. A lower elevation angle corresponds to a larger footprint of up to several kilometers and thus may introduce strong multipath interference in the measurements. The presented results also confirmed the GNSS-R observation of superelevation phenomenon that was first discussed in [1]. The ionosphere effects and L2 signal's competitive contributions to the retrieval noise and ionospheric correction are also discussed.