Potential for Estimating the Thickness of Freshwater Lake Ice by GPS Interferometric Reflectometry

The potential for inferring the thickness of freshwater lake ice by the global positioning system (GPS) is explored. Specifically, lake ice thickness is inferred by using measured GPS signals and calculated results from an interferometric reflectometry (IR) model. The difference of these two quantities is minimized with a nonlinear least squares fitting algorithm. Only low elevation angles (≤ 25°) of received GPS signals are used in this study. The possibility of estimating lake ice thickness by using the received GPS signals from satellite PRN 10 and the GPS-IR model is demonstrated from a 1-day experiment. For this satellite, the average inferred ice thickness (38.0 cm) slightly underestimated the in situ measurements (39.4 cm ± 1.3 cm). GPS satellites PRN 2 and PRN 24 are also used in this study. However, signals from these satellites significantly underestimated the in situ measurements.