Airborne GNSS-R Wind Retrievals Using Delay–Doppler Maps

Global navigation satellite system (GNSS) reflectometry has emerged recently as a promising remote sensing tool to retrieve various geophysical parameters of the Earth's surface. GNSS-reflected signals, after being received and processed by the airborne or spaceborne receiver, are available as delay correlation waveforms or as delay–Doppler maps (DDMs). In the case of a rough ocean surface, those characteristics can be related to the rms of the L-band limited slopes of the surface waves and, from there, to the surface wind speed. The raw GNSS-reflected signal can be either processed in real time by the receiver or recorded and stored on board and postprocessed in a laboratory. The latter approach leveraging a software receiver allows more flexibility while processing the raw data. This work analyzes DDMs obtained as a result of processing of the data collected by the Global Positioning System (GPS) data logger/software receiver on board the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration Gulfstream-IV jet aircraft. Thereafter, the DDMs were used to retrieve surface wind speed employing several different metrics that characterize the DDM extent in the Doppler frequency–delay domain. In contrast to previous works in which winds have been retrieved by fitting the theoretically modeled curves into measured correlation waveforms, here, we do not rely on any model for the determination. Instead, the approach is based on a linear regression between DDM observables and the wind speeds obtained in simultaneous GPS dropsonde measurements.