Cryospheric Applications of Novel GNSS Grazing Angle Reflections Collected by Spire CubeSats

Spire Global operates the world’s largest and rapidly growing constellation of CubeSats performing GNSS based science and Earth observation. Currently, the Spire constellation, with many satellites in polar orbits, performs a variety of GNSS science, including radio occultation (GNSS-RO), ionosphere and space weather measurements, and precise orbit determination. These satellites have been primarily tasked to perform GNSS-RO to produce accurate profiles of atmospheric temperature, pressure, and water vapor and to collect millions of daily ionospheric total electron content measurements. Previous work showed that grazing angle reflections of GNSS signals off of ocean and sea ice surfaces serendipitously collected during radio occultation measurements had the potential to perform precision altimetry (< 10 cm) over sea ice surfaces.

In 2019, Spire reprogrammed its STRATOS GNSS science receiver to collect grazing angle reflection observations on Spire's large constellation of orbiting GNSS-RO satellites. To accomplish this, the open-loop tracking used in GNSS-RO collection was modified to perform open-loop prediction and tracking of grazing angle reflections between 5-30 deg elevation. Initial results confirm coherency of reflections over most sea ice surfaces and some open ocean surfaces. Full altimetric processing has been performed and is being productionized, confirming  sub-10 cm precision over sea ice where reflections were coherent, with some initial measurements showing altimetric height precision less than 2 cm RMS relative a mean sea surface (e.g., DTU18). Due to the large number of current and planned GNSS-RO satellites as Spire's constellation scales to over 100 operating GNSS-RO satellites, this technique has excellent potential to complement other sensors such as ICESat-2 and Cryosat-2.

A larger production period has now begun on multiple Spire satellites that will result in much larger quantities of diverse cryospheric measurements (sea ice as well as ice sheets will be sampled). We will present further results of this new and potentially revolutionary technique to use existing orbiting GNSS-RO satellite constellations to perform precision sea ice altimetry.