Sensing Water: The Rongowai airborne remote sensing mission for GNSS-Reflectometry across New Zealand
The Global Navigation Satellite System (GNSS), emit radio signals in the L-band to enable precise positioning on the Earth’s surface. GNSS has become ubiquitous in our everyday lives, underpinning location-based technologies from traffic routing to precision agriculture. These GNSS “signals of opportunity” have been used in novel space borne missions such as CyGNSS (Cyclone GNSS), which is primarily designed to observe the ocean surface under tropical cyclone systems. However, signals reflected from the land surface have been found to sensitive to soil moisture and surface water, providing a valuable additional source of data.