Preliminary Results of a GNSS-R Simulation to Sense Canopy Parameters

Soil moisture (SM) plays a significant role on the Earth's water, energy, and carbon transfers. Thus, global sensing of SM is vital. Conventional active and passive monostatic instruments have been used for SM retrieval for decades. For the sake of increasing spatiotemporal resolutions and decreasing costs, Global Navigation Satellite System Reflectometry (GNSS-R) have been examined recently. However, the high number of dynamic factors that affect GNSS-R observables in land applications make the use of this technique challenging. In this paper, we aim to present our preliminary observations about simulated GNSS-R signatures through a vegetated terrain in order to unveil GNSS-R sensitivity to dynamic land parameters. We exploited our recently developed coherent bistatic vegetation scattering model (SCoBi-Veg) for these simulations. We modelled a full growing season of corn field by using in situ measurement data. We observed received power variations as a function of observation angle and corn growth stage. First findings indicate the dominance of the coherent contribution over incoherent one. Results also demonstrate the effect of the growth stages on the received power.