Lake Altimetry Using Long Coherent Integration Carrier Phase Measurements from Airborne GNSS Reflectometry

Abstract

Today, land and ocean observations are crucial for monitoring climate change. The method of GNSS reflectometry is an opportunistic way to provide low-cost observations of many geophysical parameters. However, although this method has been the subject of numerous research studies, work is still in progress to improve its possibilities and fields of application. This paper focuses on GNSS reflectometry using carrier phase measurements for water altimetry measurements. The difficulties in implementing such a method lie in the need to collect a coherent signal and to solve the integer ambiguity value. In this context, the implementation of innovative signal processing is described, including the correlation of the reflected signals in dedicated software and the prolongation of the coherent integration time to enhance signal coherency. These processes were applied to data collected over Carcans-Hourtin Lake in France to compute the height of the reflection surface which was then compared to in situ GNSS buoy height measurements. The results show that at 300 ft (91.44 m), the differences between the lake heights measured with the buoy and with the reflectometry data can reach less than 1 cm for the L1, E1 and E5 GNSS signals. In addition, the slope of the geoid estimated with the reflectometry data is very consistent with that of the RAF20 geoid model, with a difference of up to less than 2 mm/km.