Accuracy analysis of GNSS-IR snow depth inversion algorithms

Abstract

In recent years, with the continuous development of Global Navigation Satellite System (GNSS), it has been applied not only to navigation and positioning, but also to Earth surface environment monitoring. At present, when performing GNSS-IR (GNSS Interferometric Reflectometry) snow depth inversion, Lomb-Scargle Periodogram (LSP) spectrum analysis is mainly used to calculate the vertical height from the antenna phase center to the reflection surface. However, it has the problem of low identification of power spectrum analysis, which may lead to frequency leakage. Therefore, Fast Fourier Transform (FFT) spectrum analysis and Nonlinear Least Square Fitting (NLSF) are introduced to calculate the vertical height in this paper. The GNSS-IR snow depth inversion experiment is carried out by using the observation data of P351 station in PBO (Plate Boundary Observatory) network of the United States from 2013 to 2016. Three algorithms are used to invert the snow depth and compared with the actual snow depth provided by the station 490 in the SNOTEL network. The observations data of L1 and L2 bands are respectively used to find the optimal combination between different algorithms further to improve the accuracy of GNSS-IR snow depth inversion. For L1 band, different snow depths correspond to different optimal algorithms. When the snow depth is less than 0.8 m, the inversion accuracy of NLSF algorithm is the highest. When the snow depth is greater than 0.8 m, the inversion accuracy of FFT algorithm is higher. Therefore, according to the different snow depth, a combined algorithm of NLSF + FFT is proposed for GNSS-IR snow depth inversion. Compared with the traditional LSP algorithm, the inversion accuracy of the combined algorithm is improved by 10%. For L2 band data, the results show that the accuracy of snow depth inversion of various algorithms do not change with the variations of snow depth. Among the three single algorithms, the inversion accuracy of FFT algorithm is better than that of LSP and NLSF algorithms.