Soil moisture measurements are important for disciplines such as hydrology, climatology and agriculture. GNSS Reflectometry (GNSS-R) technique has been demonstrated to be an effective tool to sense soil moisture content (SMC). Besides airborne observations, great efforts have also been made concerning ground-based measurements. However, those methods are either based on too many hypotheses or depend on specially-made receivers. This paper proposes a new interference method which can extract parameters related to SMC from the raw SNR data routinely collected by geodetic GPS receivers. During long-term observation, the surface soil moisture variations can be ideally tracked by the effective reflector height, which decreases along with the increasing SMC. This method can also be applied to the retrieval of the surface topography around the GPS stations.
['Xuefeng Peng', 'Wei Wan', 'Xiuwan Chen']
Using GPS SNR data to estimate Soil Moisture variations: Proposing a new interference model