Estimation of Snow Parameters with GPS and Galileo

Abstract

The Snow Water Equivalent (SWE) is a key parameter for hydrological applications. In this paper, we describe a novel snow monitoring station that determines SWE solely from differential carrier phase measurements of both GPS and Galileo satellites. The SWE estimates are compared with several traditional sensors to demonstrate the achievable performance. The measurement results also show that just 4 Galileo satellites reduce the combined fixing time of RTK positioning by up to 3 minutes.