Abstract
A method for retrieving snow and sea ice thickness is developed and simulations are conducted to evaluate the feasibility of the proposed method. When using a defined envelope amplitude and phase, for the snow-free case, RMSEs of 0.24 and 0.34 m can be obtained; for the snow-covered case, the RMSEs of the retrieved sea ice thickness decrease to 0.45 and 0.48 m, and the RMSEs of the retrieved snow thickness are 0.12 and 0.13 m. A method combining the envelope amplitude and phase is proposed to further improve the retrieval accuracy. The simulated results show that combining these two observables can provide an RMSE of 0.19 m for the snow-free case, and for the snow-covered case, the RMSEs of the retrieved snow and sea ice thicknesses are reduced to 0.09 and 0.42 m, respectively. Furthermore, linear polarization observations are proposed and tested. The vertical polarization shows the best measurement performance. When the envelope amplitude and phase of the vertical polarization carrier to noise ratio (CNR) are combined to retrieve snow and sea ice thicknesses, the RMSEs of the retrieved sea ice thickness for the snow-free case decrease to 0.13, and for the snow-covered case, the RMSEs of the retrieved snow and sea ice thicknesses decrease to 0.07 and 0.17 m, respectively.
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Data Availability
The datasets for this work were simulated by a GNSS-IR simulator. Datasets are available from the author on reasonable request (E-mail: wangf.19@163.com).
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Acknowledgements
This study was financially supported by the China Postdoctoral Innovative Talent Support Program (BX20200039), the National Natural Science Foundation of China (42104031), the fellowship of China Postdoctoral Science Foundation (2021M700319) and BeiDou Technology Achievement Transformation and Industrialization of Beihang (BARI2003). The reviewers are acknowledged for their valuable comments and suggestions.
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Wang, F., Yang, D., Zhang, B. et al. Can sea ice thickness be retrieved using GNSS-interferometric reflectometry?. GPS Solut 26, 128 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10291-022-01309-0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10291-022-01309-0