Abstract
Coastal global navigation satellite system (GNSS) stations equipped with a standard geodetic receiver and antenna enable water level measurement using the GNSS interferometry reflectometry (GNSS-IR) technique. By using GNSS-IR, the vertical distance between the antenna and the reflector surface (e.g., water surface) can be obtained in the vertical (height) reference frame. In this study, the signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) data from four selected stations over three months are used for this purpose. We determined the predominant multipath frequency in SNR data that is obtained using Lomb–Scargle periodogram (LSP) method. The obtained sea surface heights (SSH) are assessed using tide gauge observations regarding accuracy and correlation coefficients. In this study, we investigated daily and hourly GNSS observations and used single frequencies of GPS (L1, L2 and L5), GLONASS (L1 and L2), Galileo (L1, L5, L6, L7 and L8), and BeiDou (L2 and L7) signals to estimate the SSH. The results show that the optimal signals for extracting the SSH are the L1 signal for the GPS, Galileo, and GLONASS systems and the L2 signal for the BeiDou system. The accuracy and correlation parameters for the optimal GPS signal in the daily mode are 2 cm and 0.87, respectively. The same parameters for the optimal GLONASS signal are 4 cm and 0.91. However, the obtained accuracy and correlation coefficients using the best Galileo and BeiDou signals are reduced, i.e., 4 cm and 0.88 using Galileo and 12 cm and 0.52 by employing the Galileo signals, respectively. Our results also show that the GPS L1 signal is more consistent with the tide gauge data. In the following, using the time series derived from the L1 signal and tide gauge readings, the tidal frequencies are extracted and compared using the Least Square Harmonic Estimation (LS-HE) approach. The findings demonstrate that 145 significant tidal frequencies can be extracted using the GNSS-IR time series. The existence of an acceptable correlation between the tidal frequencies of the GNSS-IR and the tide gauge time series indicates the usefulness of the GNSS-IR time series for tide studies. From our results, we can conclude that the GNSS-IR technique can be applied in coastal locations alongside tide gauge measurements for a variety of purposes.
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Data availability
All the data used in this research were obtained from publicly available data sources. The RINEX GNSS observation files can be downloaded from http://www.igs.org. Files related to time series of water level observations for tide-gauge stations can be downloaded from http://www.psmsl.org.
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Acknowledgements
The authors are going to thank the IGS and PSMSL for providing the RINEX data and tide gauge water level data. We thank the editor-in-chief and anonymous reviewers for their careful reading of our manuscript and their many insightful comments and suggestions.
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SG contributed to coding, test on real data, writing, and investigation. MB contributed to supervision, discussions and suggestions during the development, and methodology. KP provided the main conceptual ideas and contributed to the writing, investigation, coding, advising, and conceptual development. SF contributed to writing, the coding, investigation, designing, supervision and conceptual development.
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Appendix
Appendix
See Figs.
Sea level time series obtained from hourly GPS L2 signal and coastal tide gauge in stations GTGU, AT01, MCHN, and MERS. The x-axes show decimals of the year
11,
Sea level time series obtained from hourly GPS L5 signal and coastal tide gauge in stations AT01 and MERS. The x-axes show decimals of the year
12,
Sea level time series obtained from the hourly GLONASS L2 signal and coastal tide gauge in stations GTGU, MERS and AT01. The x-axes show decimals of the year
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Sea level time series obtained from the hourly Galileo’s L1, L5, L7 and L8 signals and coastal tide gauge in station MERS. The x-axes show decimals of the year
14,
Semidiurnal and diurnal signals in the univariate power spectrum obtained from tide gauge observations of the station MARS. The x-axes show period in hour
15,
Semidiurnal and diurnal signals in the univariate power spectrum obtained from GNSS-IR observations of the station TGDE. The x-axes show period in hour
16 and
Semidiurnal and diurnal signals in the univariate power spectrum obtained from tide gauge observations of the station TGDE. The x-axes show period in hour
17.
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Gholamrezaee, S., Bagherbandi, M., Parvazi, K. et al. A study on the quality of GNSS signals for extracting the sea level height and tidal frequencies utilizing the GNSS-IR approach. GPS Solut 27, 72 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10291-023-01416-6
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10291-023-01416-6