Operational Airborne GNSS-R Aboard Air New Zealand Domestic Aircraft

NASA's Cyclone Global Navigation Satellite System (CYGNSS) mission has been a pathfinder in the field of GNSS reflectometry (GNSS-R), with a constellation of 8 microsatellites measuring windspeeds over the entire tropics every few hours. More recently, terrestrial GNSS-R is being exploited to reveal records of soil moisture and surface water inundation dynamics. In an exciting partnership between NASA and New Zealand, Air New Zealand will accommodate and host a recently developed next-generation GNSS-R receiver (NGRx) and commercial aviation GPS omnidirectional antennas on a domestic Q300 aircraft. The result will be unprecedented high-resolution, wide coverage long-term records of soil moisture and inundation dynamics over New Zealand's diverse landscape and ecosystems, independent of cloud cover. Such data will support terrestrial calibration and validation of CYGNSS while simultaneously advancing the technology readiness level of the NgRx and enabling new remote sensing science investigations in New Zealand.