Calibration Strategy for Compact Polarimetric GNSS-R Instruments

Abstract

Polarimetric Global Navigation Satellite System - Reflectometry (GNSS-R) is being proposed by different teams as a solution to directly estimate soil moisture. Up to date, two approaches using polarimetric GNSS-R have been proposed to estimate soil moisture, using the ratio between the right-hand and left-hand circularly polarized received signals, and using the ratio between the linear horizontal and vertical components at a set of incidence angles, known as Hybrid Compact Polarimetric (HCP) GNSS-R. In this manuscript, the necessary calibrations of a received HCP GNSS-R signal are presented. The Stokes parameters of the signal are required to compensate all non-idealities. A methodology to calibrate the receiver effects, scene-antenna polarimetric misalignment, Faraday rotation, and transmitter non-idealities is proposed. Finally, the calibration performance is evaluated using several statistical parameters and polarimetric ratio models based on two different soil moisture products. Results show a correlation coefficient increase of 4.7% with respect to the model derived from the Soil Moisture Active Passive (SMAP) soil moisture product, and a 6.5% improvement with respect to the model derived from the European Center for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts (ECMWF) Reanalysis v5 (ERA-5) monthly average soil moisture product. Furthermore, the proposed calibrations show an unbiased root-mean-square error reduction of 6.3% and 6.8% for the SMAP soil moisture model and the ERA-5 model, respectively. Due to the SMAP antenna and pointing design, SMAP-Reflectometry (SMAP-R) is implicitly insensitive to some of the corrections. More significant corrections should be expected for future polarimetric GNSS-R instruments as European Space Agency (ESA) HydroGNSS.