Snow Water Equivalent Estimation for a Snow-Covered Prairie Grass Field by GPS Interferometric Reflectometry

Mark D. Jacobson

Department of Mathematics, Montana State University Billings, Billings, USA..

DOI: 10.4236/pos.2012.33005                

Abstract

The amount of water stored in snowpack is the single most important measurement for the management of water supply and flood control systems. The available water content in snow is called the snow water equivalent (SWE). The product of snow density and depth provides an estimate of SWE. In this paper, snow depth and density are estimated by a nonlinear least squares fitting algorithm. The inputs to this algorithm are global positioning system (GPS) signals and a simple GPS interferometric reflectometry (GPS-IR) model. The elevation angles of interest at the GPS receiving antenna are between 5⁰ and 30⁰. A snow-covered prairie grass field experiment shows potential for inferring snow water equivalent using GPS-IR. For this case study, the average inferred snow depth (17.9 cm) is within the in situ measurement range (17.6 cm ± 1.5 cm). However, the average inferred snow density (0.13 g^.cm^-3) overestimates the in situ measurements (0.08 g^.cm^-3 ± 0.02 g^.cm^-3). Consequently, the average inferred SWE (2.33 g^.cm^-2) also overestimates the in situ calculations (1.38 g^.cm^-2 ± 0.36 g^.cm^-2).

Keywords

Global Positioning System (GPS); GPS Interferometric Reflectometry (GPS-IR); Snow Depth;Snow Density; Snow Water Equivalent (SWE); Multipath; Specular Reflection

Conflicts of Interest

The authors declare no conflicts of interest.

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