A first comprehensive evaluation of China’s GNSS-R airborne campaign: part II—river remote sensing

Abstract

The Global Navigation Satellite System Reflectometry (GNSS-R) has been proven to be a powerful technique for retrieving geophysical parameters of ocean and land. Airborne GNSS-R is an important experimental platform, because it is not only needed as validation for spaceborne application, but also possesses the advantages to be capable of remote sensing of small and medium scale targets, such as rivers and lakes. This paper presents an overview of China’s airborne GNSS-R campaign conducted on May 30, 2014, in Henan. The campaign has two objectives, i.e.: (1) to examine the capability of a GNSS-R payload developed by National Space Science Center, Chinese Academy of Sciences (NSSC, CAS) for airborne observations and (2) to study the algorithms for soil moisture and river remote sensing, including altimetry and flow velocity measurement. A previous paper has presented results of soil moisture retrieval as part I, and in this paper, initial results of the Yellow River remote sensing are presented as part II. This paper presents the river altimetry results and explores a new potential application of GNSS-R technology, which is used to detect the flow velocity of the river. The river surface height results observed by code delay altimetry method were consistent with the height results of GPS dual-frequency differential positioning altimetry. The GNSS-R altimetry results showed that decimeter level heights were achieved in 1-min sliding average. Comparing with in situ measurements, the GNSS-R flow velocity result was reasonable; the error was about 0.027m/s, which indicated the validity and feasibility of using GNSS-R technique to detect river flow velocity.