Modeling of the GNSS-R signal as a function of soil moisture and vegetation biomass

Very recently, it has been observed that GNSS-R can provide a significant contribution to agricultural and forestry applications, since the use of GNSS signals as sources of opportunity enables bistatic radar measurements at L-band, which showed to be sensitive to soil moisture and vegetation parameters. This perspective has been investigated in two experimental activities funded by the European Space Agency: the LEiMON and GRASS campaigns. This work has been carried out with the aim of interpreting the data collected during the two campaigns over land. This requires to model the coherent component associated to the mean surface, but at the same time the diffuse incoherent component due to roughness at wavelength scale. In presence of vegetation, both components must be taken into account. The paper presents the approach followed to develop a simulator of GNSS-R data over land, aiming to support potential applications of GNSS-R for soil moisture and biomass retrieval.