Enabling Technology Transforms a Prototype GNSS Interferometric Reflectometry (GNSS-IR) System to Global Operation

GPS Interferometric Reflectometry (GPS-IR) measurements of snow depth/snow water equivalent, soil moisture, and vegetation water content with a scale of ~1000 m2 were developed and validated at the University of Colorado, Boulder, funded by NSF. The prototype system demonstrated reliable daily generation of products for sites in the Plate Boundary Observatory, an NSF-funded homogeneous network of permanent GPS sites installed in the U.S. to monitor tectonic motion.

To enable the transition from research to global operations including potentially 10000+ existing global heterogeneous GNSS sites, a 2-year CU/JPL NASA Advanced Information Systems Technology (AIST) project developed technology to

• Adapt the product generation software for use in a modern IT framework, Apache OODT (Object Oriented Data Technology). This open-source system currently serves as the infrastructure backbone for various JPL, NASA, and non-NASA science data systems.
• Implement a single database for capturing metadata describing a GNSS station, its available data, and the site’s reflection qualities.
• Evaluate characteristics of candidate new sites for suitability for GNSS-IR, previously requiring manual gathering and examination of several sources of information.
• Offer a portal that permits a site owner to input metadata for candidate new site(s), validates the metadata, evaluates the physical and data characteristics of the site, and (if appropriate) modifies the system configuration to incorporate that site into regular daily processing.

We will briefly review the GPS-IR (or more generally, GNSS-IR) technique, demonstrate the enabling technology, and discuss ongoing development to implement the system in a cloud computing environment.