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Estimation of snow depth using pseudorange and carrier phase observations of GNSS single-frequency signal

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Abstract

A new method is proposed to estimate snow depth by using observations of the GNSS single-frequency signal collected by a ground-based receiver. The proposed method utilizes the pseudorange and carrier phase observations to form the geometry-free combination. Based on mathematical formulas of the amplitude attenuation factor, the pseudorange multipath error, and the carrier phase multipath error, a function is derived serving as the theoretical model that describes the relationship between the antenna height and the peak frequency of a series of function values associated with the range of satellite elevation angles. In the observation data processing stage, the moving average filtering method is used to remove the ionospheric delay from the combined observation series, followed by spectrum analysis to obtain the peak frequency, which is used to determine the antenna height and hence snow depth based on the theoretical model. A weighting method is proposed to combine individual snow depth estimates related to the use of signals of individual satellites to enhance the estimation accuracy. Each weighting coefficient is proportional to the maximum of the power spectral density of the combined observation series. The proposed method is substantiated by simulations and observations from geodetic-grade receivers, which can process multi-constellations and multi-frequency GNSS signals. Two field GNSS data sets collected in Heilongjing, China, and Colorado, USA, were used to evaluate the method. The results show that the root-mean-square error of GPS, BDS, and Galileo-based snow depth estimations is in the range of 2–6 cm when the topography around the GNSS receiver is flat.

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Acknowledgements

This work was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China under Grants 41574031 and 41730109, Advanced Research Projects of the 13th 5-year Plan of Civil Aerospace Technology, and Key Laboratory of Geospace Environment and Geodesy, Ministry of Education, Wuhan University under Grant Number 17-02-07. The authors would like to thank the anonymous reviewers for their valuable comments and suggestions.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Geodesy and Geomatics, Wuhan University, Wuhan, 430079, China

    Yunwei Li, Xin Chang, Shuyao Wang & Jiancheng Li

  2. School of Environmental Science and Spatial Informatics, China University of Mining and Technology, 1 Daxue Road, Xuzhou, 221116, Jiangsu, China

    Kegen Yu

  3. Key Laboratory of Geophysical Geodesy, National Administration of Surveying, Mapping and Geoinformation, Wuhan, 430079, China

    Jiancheng Li

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  1. Yunwei Li
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  2. Xin Chang
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  3. Kegen Yu
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Correspondence to Kegen Yu.

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Li, Y., Chang, X., Yu, K. et al. Estimation of snow depth using pseudorange and carrier phase observations of GNSS single-frequency signal. GPS Solut 23, 118 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10291-019-0912-5

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