Sensitivity of Multipath Peak Frequency of Navigation with Indian Constellation (NavIC) towards Surface Soil Moisture over Bare Land

The exploitation of GNSS signals for soil moisture as one of the land applications is the current interest of researchers due to its multiple advantages over existing soil moisture retrieval techniques based on traditional radiometer and other datasets. Multipath phase and amplitude of GNSS C/N o data have been mostly utilized to determine the sensitivity of soil moisture. However, in this work, we have analyzed the multipath peak frequency to determine its sensitivity for field soil moisture. The multipath frequency is used to consider constant when studies are carried out with multipath phase or amplitude. Here, we have demonstrated that the multipath peak frequency is a function of field soil moisture which can be evaluated efficiently with Lomb Scargle Periodogram (LSP). Navigation with Indian Constellation (NavIC) data has been used to determine the correlation between multipath peak frequency and surface soil moisture. The obtained sensitivity results are very optimistic (correlation coefficient = 0.69), which can be further utilized for developing soil moisture estimation model using NavIC data to cater different land applications.