First Assessment of Geophysical Sensitivities from Spaceborne Galileo and BeiDou GNSS-Reflectometry Data Collected by the UK TechDemoSat-1 Mission

The UK’s TechDemoSat-1 (TDS-1), launched 2014, has demonstrated the use of global positioning system (GPS) signals for monitoring ocean winds and sea ice. Here it is shown, for the first time, that Galileo and BeiDou signals detected by TDS-1 show similar promise. TDS-1 made seven raw data collectio...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Remote Sensing
Main Authors: Matthew L. Hammond, Giuseppe Foti, Jonathan Rawlinson, Christine Gommenginger, Meric Srokosz, Lucinda King, Martin Unwin, Josep Roselló
Format: Text
Language:English
Published: Multidisciplinary Digital Publishing Institute 2020
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Online Access:https://doi.org/10.3390/rs12182927
Description
Summary:The UK’s TechDemoSat-1 (TDS-1), launched 2014, has demonstrated the use of global positioning system (GPS) signals for monitoring ocean winds and sea ice. Here it is shown, for the first time, that Galileo and BeiDou signals detected by TDS-1 show similar promise. TDS-1 made seven raw data collections, recovering returns from Galileo and BeiDou, between November 2015 and March 2019. The retrieved open ocean delay Doppler maps (DDMs) are similar to those from GPS. Over sea ice, the Galileo DDMs show a distinctive triple peak. Analysis, adapted from that for GPS DDMs, gives Galileo’s signal-to-noise ratio (SNR), which is found to be inversely sensitive to wind speed, as for GPS. A Galileo track transiting from open ocean to sea ice shows a strong instantaneous SNR response. These results demonstrate the potential of future spaceborne constellations of GNSS-R (global navigation satellite system–reflectometry) instruments for exploiting signals from multiple systems: GPS, Galileo, and BeiDou.