The HydroGNSS mission—ESA’s first Earth Observation “Scout” mission to reach orbit—launched from Vandenberg Space Force Base in California in November 2025 and consists of two small satellites designed to monitor key hydrological and climate variables using signals from global navigation satellite systems (GNSS). 

EECL supplied six multiband ultra-low-noise microwave amplifiers (LNAs) that form part of the radio-frequency front end for the mission’s GNSS reflectometry receiver. The LNAs amplify extremely weak reflected navigation signals while preserving signal integrity, allowing the satellites to capture usable data at the earliest stage of signal reception. 

HydroGNSS uses a technique known as GNSS reflectometry, in which satellites receive navigation signals from systems such as GPS and Galileo after they bounce off Earth’s surface. By analyzing those reflections, the spacecraft can derive environmental measurements including soil moisture, freeze–thaw conditions over permafrost, inundation and wetlands, and above-ground biomass. 

Early commissioning results indicate the payload hardware is performing as expected. Both satellites have successfully begun collecting Delay Doppler Maps—datasets that characterize the reflected GNSS signals and allow scientists to extract environmental information about the reflecting surface. 

The LNAs were designed, manufactured and tested in the United Kingdom under a contract with Surrey Satellite Technology Ltd. (SSTL), which built the satellites and the GNSS receiver payloads. Their in-orbit performance validates the RF hardware after several years of development and space-qualification testing. 

Low-noise amplification is particularly critical for GNSS reflectometry missions because the reflected navigation signals arriving at the satellite are extremely faint compared with direct signals from the GNSS satellites themselves. Maintaining a very low noise figure in the front-end electronics enables the receiver to detect these weak reflections and generate usable scientific data products. 

HydroGNSS will collect global measurements of hydrological conditions to support climate monitoring and environmental research. According to ESA, the twin satellites operate in complementary orbital positions to maximize global coverage while continuously gathering reflected GNSS signals for analysis.

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Organizers and police for Finnmarksløpet, Europe’s longest sled dog race, say ongoing jamming and spoofing are degrading the GPS trackers carried by each team, forcing the event to lean more heavily on trail marking and traditional navigation.

Race tracking hit by jamming and spoofing

According to reporting in the Barents Observer, Norway’s Finnmark police and race officials have confirmed that GNSS disturbances are affecting the race’s live tracking system. Each sled in Finnmarksløpet carries a GPS device so organizers, safety teams, and the public can follow progress across the Finnmark plateau. Military jamming and spoofing from Russia’s Kola Peninsula are now interfering with both reception and transmission of those signals. 

Tarjei Sirma-Tellefsen, Chief of Staff at the Finnmark Police District, said police are in “good dialogue” with the race regarding participant safety but “unfortunately see GNSS disturbances occurring in the area.” In practice, that can cause sled positions to freeze, jump erratically, or appear in the wrong place altogether on the public map.

The race route runs from Alta east across the Finnmark plateau to Kirkenes, near the Russian border, and back again. Portions of the course follow the Pasvik valley along the western shore of the river that separates Norway from Russia’s Kola Peninsula – placing mushers and their GPS equipment squarely inside a region that has seen repeated interference over the past several years. 

Part of a broader High North interference pattern

Finnmarksløpet is the latest in a series of civilian activities in Norway’s far north affected by Russian GNSS interference.

Norwegian authorities first reported systematic jamming impacting aviation and other GPS users in eastern Finnmark in 2017. District police at the time described outages as frequent enough to be considered “the new normal,” requiring long-term planning for degraded GPS. 

Since then, pilots approaching Kirkenes and other northeastern airports have reported near-daily GNSS interference, with signals distorted or lost on approach and alternative navigation systems such as inertial and ground-based aids used as primary references. 

Further south, Finland and Estonia have issued navigation warnings for the Gulf of Finland due to persistent GNSS disruption traced to Russian and Belarusian territory, citing increased risk to shipping and a need for mariners to treat satellite navigation with caution. 

Taken together, the incidents show a broad arc of GNSS interference stretching from the Arctic High North down into the Baltic – with the dog-sled race now providing a very public, human-scale illustration of the problem.

A live test of “everyday” PNT resilience

Finnmarksløpet is a reminder that satellite navigation is now embedded in activities far beyond aviation, shipping, or defense.

In this case:

• Each team’s GPS tracker underpins safety monitoring, media coverage, and fan engagement.
• Organizers, rescue teams, and family members rely on those positions to confirm that mushers and dogs are on course and moving as expected in harsh winter terrain.
• When jamming or spoofing degrades those signals, race control has to fall back on more traditional tools: marked trails, checkpoints, radio communications, and map-and-compass navigation for participants. 

From a PNT resilience standpoint, the situation checks several familiar boxes:

• Single-sensor dependence: GPS trackers are often built around L1-only receivers with limited interference detection.
• Lack of redundancy: consumer-grade tracking platforms may not fuse inertial sensors, terrestrial beacons, or multi-constellation, multi-frequency GNSS in ways that help detect spoofing or jamming.
• Human expectations: fans and even some safety stakeholders may assume that a public tracking map is authoritative, when in fact it may be running on degraded or manipulated data.

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New research supported by the European Space Agency’s (ESA) Third Party Missions programme has generated Arctic-wide sea ice freeboard maps using GNSS-Reflectometry (GNSS-R) data captured by Spire Global, Inc.’s GNSS-Reflectometry (GNSS-R) multipurpose listening constellation.

Led by the Technical University of Munich (DGFI-TUM) and the Norwegian Research Centre, the study leveraged Spire’s grazing-angle GNSS-Reflectometry (GNSS-R) — a radio frequency (RF) sensing technique that analyzes reflected navigation signals — to retrieve sea ice freeboard measurements across an entire winter season. The results show strong alignment with established altimetry datasets, including ESA’s CryoSat mission, validating the complementary role of commercial satellite data alongside government missions.

While GNSS signals have long been used for positioning, this research highlights how reflected signal analysis can extend their value into large-scale Earth observation applications, delivering persistent coverage independent of sunlight or weather conditions.

“Advances in miniaturization, digital signal processing, and machine learning have fundamentally changed what’s possible in RF sensing,” said Theresa Condor, Chief Executive Officer of Spire Global. “Commercial constellations can now deliver persistent, high-quality RF data that complements traditional government systems with greater flexibility and cost efficiency. As environmental monitoring requirements intensify, we’re seeing agencies increasingly integrate commercially sourced RF datasets into operational architectures, reflecting the continued maturation of this market and the growing role of commercial infrastructure in government missions.”

Read more on the research from ESA: Reflected satellite signals unlock new insights into Arctic sea ice

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As world leaders assemble for the 30th Conference of the Parties (COP30) to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) in Brazil, UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer warned that the international “consensus is gone,” on fighting climate change, signaling a political environment more fractured than at any point since the 2015 Paris Agreement. Yet, as geopolitical alignment weakens, the European GNSS community is readying a mission designed to deliver precisely the kind of objective, physics-based data that can underpin global climate action.

HydroGNSS comprises two identical small satellites flying in low Earth orbit (LEO) at roughly 550 km, positioned 180 degrees apart to maximize global revisit. Each spacecraft carries a GNSS reflectometry (GNSS-R) payload engineered to capture both direct and Earth-reflected L-band signals from Galileo, GPS, BeiDou, and GLONASS.

By comparing the properties of the reflected waveforms, such as delay, Doppler shift, phase coherence, and signal-to-noise ratio, the system derives geophysical parameters with resilience to cloud cover, limited sunlight, and radio-frequency variability. This makes GNSS-R particularly well suited for hydrological monitoring in regions where traditional sensors face constraints.

The mission focuses on four climate-critical variables: soil moisture, freeze-thaw state, inundation extent, and above-ground biomass. Soil-moisture retrievals support drought forecasting, precision-agriculture models, and wildfire-risk assessments. Freeze-thaw mapping contributes to monitoring permafrost integrity, a key uncertainty in carbon-feedback projections. Wetland-inundation observations help quantify methane emissions and track floodplain evolution. Biomass estimates provide independent constraints on terrestrial carbon stocks, complementing optical and radar-based methods.

Key climate insights

The political significance of HydroGNSS is difficult to overstate. As Starmer cautions that diverging national priorities threaten coordinated climate action, HydroGNSS will offer a globally consistent and well-calibrated data stream. Unlike negotiated pledges, GNSS-R observations cannot be distorted by political framing: if soil-moisture regimes shift, if thaw boundaries advance, if wetlands decline, HydroGNSS will record the change with uniform methodology across all continents.

For ESA and the GNSS community, the mission also showcases the value of the Scout-class model, i.e. rapid-development, cost-capped missions designed to adapt innovative techniques into operational tools. If HydroGNSS performs as expected, it will strengthen the case for future GNSS-R constellations capable of delivering near-real-time hydrological intelligence.

As COP30 exposes shifting political winds, HydroGNSS’s global, physics-driven data record will help ensure that climate-related decisions remain grounded in observable reality. HydroGNSS is being developed under ESA’s FutureEO programme, within the Scout-class missions designed for rapid, low-cost Earth observation innovation.

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Swift Navigation, a leader in precise positioning technology, today announced that its Swift Partner Program has grown to include over 20 GNSS receiver manufacturers, establishing it as the largest hardware ecosystem among GNSS correction providers. This milestone, achieved less than two years after the program’s launch in October 2023, is accelerating the adoption of precise positioning in mass-market applications across automotive, robotics, mobile, and mapping.

Centimeter-accurate, reliable, and cost-effective positioning technologies are key to unlocking vehicle autonomy, industrial automation, and next-generation location-based mobile applications. However, integrating precise positioning can add complexity and cost to the product design cycle, which can delay product launches and lead to suboptimal user experiences. By enabling precise positioning at scale, Swift Navigation and its partners are accelerating the deployment of autonomy and automation across industries.

“Reaching this milestone with over 20 partners is a powerful validation of our ecosystem-first strategy,” said Holger Ippach, Executive Vice President of Product and Marketing at Swift Navigation. “We believe that by creating an open and collaborative platform, we empower our customers to select the best hardware for their needs, streamline their design process, and future-proof their investments. This success is a shared one, and it highlights how our collective efforts are making precise positioning more accessible and scalable than ever before.”

Ecosystem-Driven by Design

Swift’s ecosystem approach is redefining how precise positioning scales by enabling correction delivery across the industry’s broadest hardware base, from chipsets to complete systems. This receiver-agnostic strategy provides customers with a wide range of interoperable components and options for any stage of the design cycle. The Swift Partner Program solidifies Swift’s leadership among correction service providers, offering unmatched interoperability and accelerating time-to-market for OEMs and device makers.

Customers can maintain complete control over their hardware roadmap, selecting the best components for their needs without being tied to a proprietary corrections stack. The Skylark™ Precise Positioning Service’s receiver-agnostic architecture supports integration at every level of the technology stack, giving partners the flexibility to build low-power modules, multi-frequency systems, or full-featured receivers.

Swift’s collaborative method spans the entire OEM lifecycle, including:

• Co-defining precision targets from the outset.
• Validating designs through joint testing of early samples in labs.
• Rigorously field-testing in real-world use case conditions to ensure performance at scale.

This positions Swift as a key infrastructure layer for precise positioning that is hardware-agnostic, scalable, and capable of supporting mass adoption across various industries.

Built-in Customer Benefits

Swift’s ecosystem approach delivers several key benefits to customers:

• Streamlined Design: Provides a wide array of interoperable components, allowing developers to optimize for performance, cost, and footprint, and even retrofit existing systems.
• Minimized Costs: Customers have access to multiple hardware vendors and flexible pricing options, which minimizes costs and avoids lock-in.
• Accelerated Integration: Deep OEM collaboration, rigorously tested mass deployed components, and joint debugging reduce integration risk and accelerate the integration process.

Continuous Innovation & Future-Proofing

Swift’s technology is designed to evolve quickly to keep customers ahead.

• Future-Proof Receiver Investment: Skylark can ingest new satellites and signals as they launch, maximize the precision of quad-frequency receivers, and boost the accuracy of cost-effective receivers.
• Continuous Improvements: Swift continuously expands coverage based on customer needs and uses machine learning to improve accuracy and adapt to atmospheric variability in real time.
• Freedom to Evolve: Partners can switch, upgrade, or expand their hardware without changing their corrections pipeline.

Among the more than 20 GNSS receiver manufacturers in the Swift Partner Program, the following partners commented on their collaborations with Swift. Each offers Skylark-compatible products—ranging from chipsets and modules to complete GNSS receivers, smart antennas, and integrated systems.

Skylark-Compatible Chipsets

Sony Semiconductor Solutions
“Our collaboration with Swift Navigation brings high-accuracy positioning to compact GNSS devices using our low-power, high-performance CXD5610GF GNSS receiver IC. Seamless compatibility with Skylark enables developers to integrate precise positioning into wearables, mobile trackers, and other space-constrained applications—while maintaining multi-day battery life in continuous operation,” said Kenichi Nakano, General Manager, Analog LSI Business Division, GNSS Product Dept. at Sony Semiconductor Solutions.

STMicroelectronics
“Close collaboration with Swift Navigation during the development phase of our new TeseoVI chipset has produced a very high performance GNSS platform that integrates seamlessly with Skylark, and is tailored for automotive safety and autonomy,” said Luca Celant, General Manager, Digital Audio and Signal Solutions Division at STMicroelectronics. “Optimized for ADAS L2+ and autonomous driving, the integrated solution streamlines system integration, cuts cost, accelerates time-to-market, and delivers lane-level accuracy essential for next-generation driver assistance and autonomy.”

Skylark-Compatible Modules

Quectel
“Quectel is dedicated to delivering high-performance positioning solutions to our customers. By integrating Skylark’s advanced GNSS corrections with our high-precision modules, such as the LG290P and LC29H, we are empowering developers with flexible, cost-effective options to bring centimeter-level accuracy to applications in intelligent driving, robotics and micromobility with reliable performance across Skylark’s extensive coverage area,” said Brandon Oakes, Director, GNSS, Short Range and Channel, Quectel Wireless Solutions.

Septentrio
“Skylark unlocks the full potential of our mosaic and AsteRx receivers, combining multi-constellation, multi-frequency performance with robust interference resilience,” said Jan Van Hees, Business Development Vice President at Septentrio. “This gives our customers the confidence to deploy centimeter-accurate positioning in demanding applications such as robotics, surveying, and autonomous systems.”

Telit Cinterion
“Swift’s Skylark integration brings real‑time RTK corrections directly into our SE868K5-RTK and SE868K5-DR modules—enabling centimeter‑level accuracy for precision agriculture, drone operations, asset tracking, and other high‑value IoT applications,” said Marco Argenton, Senior Vice President of Product Management, IoT Modules at Telit Cinterion. “Whether in open skies or GPS-challenged environments like urban canyons or underground structures, our modules—coupled with Skylark—deliver unmatched positioning performance with minimal power consumption in a compact form factor, and achieve centimeter-level accuracy within seconds.”

Skylark-Compatible Receivers

Bad Elf
“Skylark’s broad and continuous coverage gives our Flex and Flex Mini customers the confidence to operate in geographies that typically aren’t served,” said Larry Fox, Vice President of Marketing and Business Development at Bad Elf. “With continental coverage across North America, Europe, and large parts of Asia-Pacific, customers know they’ll get consistent, real-time centimeter-level accuracy with high reliability, wherever they go.”

Calian
“Through our collaboration with Swift, we now offer Skylark-ready smart antennas that have been rigorously tested for performance and reliability,” said Christopher Russell, Vice President of Sales for Calian GNSS. “Together, we deliver high-precision positioning that customers can trust for applications such as navigation, driver safety, robotics, and UAVs—while dramatically reducing integration time.”

Emlid
“By pairing Swift’s Skylark Precise Positioning Service with our lightweight and rugged Reach receivers, we are delivering a turnkey surveying and mapping solution that’s easy to deploy, cost-effective, and capable of achieving centimeter-level accuracy in seconds—even in challenging environments,” said Igor Vereninov, Co-founder and CEO of Emlid.

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HydroGNSS is one of a series of ESA missions, the so-called Scout missions, part of the agency’s FutureEO program, designed to quickly and cheaply demonstrate new Earth observation techniques using small satellites.

GNSS signals are differentially reflected or scattered by the Earth’s surface, as affected by water content, specifically permittivity, surface roughness and overlying vegetation. Once analyzed, these reflected signals can provide information about various geophysical properties. Special innovations introduced by HydroGNSS are to include dual-polarization and dual-frequency (L1/E1 and L5/E5) reception, and collection of high-rate coherent reflections.

Compact but powerful Earth observation platform

HydroGNSS uses the SSTL-21 platform, measuring 45 cm x 45 cm x 70 cm and weighing around 65 kg total per satellite. The payload will be operated at near 100% duty, and can support high data download rates using an X-Band transmitter. Star cameras provide precise attitude measurements, and a xenon propulsion system permits orbit phasing, collision avoidance and supports satellite disposal at the end of the mission. The two HydroGNSS satellites will take a ride-share launch into a 550 km sun-synchronous orbit, phased apart by 180 degrees to maximize coverage.

The SGR-ReSI-Z payload is a delay Doppler mapping receiver, tracking the direct GPS and Galileo signals through a zenith antenna and processing the reflected signals from a nadir antenna to create delay Doppler maps (DDMs). The zenith and nadir antennas employ all-metal patch technology, enabling the reception of dual-frequency and dual-polarized signals. Low noise amplifiers include blackbody loads to provide calibration for the amplitude measurement. Generated measurement datasets can be stored in the satellite’s data recorder and downloaded to ground stations at allocated passes several times per day.

Speaking at his annual press briefing in Paris earlier this month (January 2025), ESA Director General Joseph Aschbacher said, “We now expect to launch HydroGNSS in the fourth quarter of 2025, as one of the three so-far-identified Scout missions, which is a series based on smaller satellites, lasting three years of development work and with a relatively limited budget of roughly 30 million for industrial contracts. We see the Scout missions as something very important for our space science work. The scientific community is evaluating them and these are the ones selected and endorsed by them.”

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Researchers from Fraunhofer and TeleOrbit delivered the project final presentation at a recent ESA-hosted event. Johannes Oeffner of Fraunhofer’s Center for Maritime Logistics and Services said “We wanted to look at different categories of biosensors and investigate the integration potential for PNT. The project brought together knowledge and expertise from a variety of scientific fields, looking at a range of different potential use cases and applications.”

Biosensors typically comprise a biological element, detecting specific biochemical reactions mediated by enzymes, immunosystems, tissues, organelles or whole cells, to detect chemical compounds. These elements are then coupled with a physical sensor or transducer that converts the biological-chemical signal into an electrical or optical signal. Biosensors are widely used in a number of applications, but are mostly seen in the healthcare field, in the monitoring and testing of medical events, in medical diagnosis. They are also used in environmental monitoring, for quality control in the pharmaceuticals and process industries, and in forensics.

Putting it together

The BIO.PNT first undertook an extensive analysis of different categories of biosensors, focusing on their potential for PNT integration. Field-effect transistor based biosensors for environmental monitoring were found to be very good candidates for combination with PNT. From there, the project developed the BIO.PNT sensor for the detection of pesticides within freshwater.

The selected bioreceptor is an organophosphate pesticide-cleaving enzyme combined with a transducer. The transducer comprises a modified field-effect transistor (FET) with amperometry, voltammetry or electrochemical impedance spectrometry (EIS).

System architecture is straightforward. One or more underwater sensor boxes contain physical biosensors for calibration and reference measurements, with pre-processing and signal processing via a microcontroller or analog front end specifically developed for the purpose. On the water’s surface, a communication box, powered by a solar panel, contains a low-power microcontroller serving as the primary control unit, and a GNSS/PNT module, with data storage handled via microSD card, and a communication module to send data to the user.

In summation, Oeffner said, “The BIO.PNT solution allows users to continuously detect organophosphate contamination in fresh water without sample preparation, in combination with PNT parameters that can be assigned to each measured value. This data would allow for environmental monitoring assessing water quality in natural ecosystems, lakes, and rivers, to locate, understand and mitigate the impact of human activities.

BIO.PNT was funded under ESA’s NAVISP program, supporting technology innovation in the European PNT industry.

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This will help The HALO Trust further its demining operations across the world. Building on the impact of the ongoing collaboration, Trimble’s latest donation will support the expansion and productivity of The HALO Trust’s mine clearance teams. The Catalyst GNSS system provides The HALO Trust with a solution for deploying precise mapping capabilities to large field teams across broad geographic areas. More field teams can now be equipped with the necessary tools to safely and efficiently clear landmines, thereby accelerating the pace of landmine clearance globally.

Since receiving Trimble’s product donations and the Trimble Foundation Fund directed grant, The HALO Trust has made remarkable progress in landmine and unexploded ordnance (UXO) clearance. From January to September 2024 alone, The HALO Trust cleared 802 minefields and battlefields, covering a total area of 10,400 acres across 12 war-torn countries. During this period, 31,209 landmines and other Explosive Remnants of War (ERW) were safely destroyed — all accurately mapped using the Trimble Catalyst GNSS system.

The HALO Trust’s use of Trimble technology has not only enhanced operational efficiency but also provided critical data for safe land reclamation and development. The accuracy and reliability of Trimble’s technology have been pivotal in ensuring the safety and success of demining operations in regions severely impacted by conflict, such as Ukraine, Angola and Sri Lanka.

“We are incredibly grateful for Trimble’s continued support,” said James Cowan, chief executive of The HALO Trust. “Trimble Catalyst and DA2 GNSS receivers have transformed our ability to map and clear minefields accurately. This new donation will enable us to expand our teams and reach even more affected communities, making a tangible difference in their lives.”

“The HALO Trust is making the world a better place,” said Emily Saunoi-Sandgren, director of environmental, social and governance (ESG) at Trimble and chair of the Trimble Foundation Fund. “Their dedication to humanitarian efforts aligns perfectly with Trimble’s mission of transforming the way the world works. By providing advanced technology solutions, we are enabling The HALO Trust to carry out their life-saving work more effectively.”

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Researchers used a specially equipped Safire ATR-42 aircraft to record GNSS signals over a variety of sites in France, including agricultural areas, forests and selected bodies of water. Onboard the aircraft were three GNSS recorders, based on the Stella Record and Playback (Stella RP) solution from M3 Systems combined with CESBIO’s Global Navigation Satellite System Reflectometry Instrument (GLORI).

Hardware was selected and configured to achieve the highest high-quality recording. The setup included two antennas provided by CNES and CESBIO, one pointing towards zenith and the other towards nadir. GNSS signals were recorded simultaneously on four channels: one channel for direct, i.e. zenith, L1/E1 signals with RHCP polarization, a second channel for direct L5/E5a signals with RHCP polarization, a third channel for reflected, i.e. nadir, L5/E5a signals with RHCP polarization, and a fourth channel for reflected L5/E5a signals with LHCP polarization. Partners employed 8-bit quantization and an OCXO clock for maximum precision.

Onboard the ATR-42 during data acquisition were CESBIO’s Pascal Fanise, Carlos Davis of M3 Systems and Robin Quinart from CNES. Coincident ground-truth tests were also carried out, including determination of in-situ soil moisture levels, leaf area indices and other measures, to confirm airborne reflectometry measurements and the results of data post-processing.

Environmental applications

In addition to providing valuable insights into forest biomass and soil moisture, the study has delivered data collected over bodies of water and at sea that can potentially serve altimetric applications. Altimetric information, including wave height, can be obtained by analyzing time difference and phase difference between direct and reflected GNSS signals, a technique that has been employed successfully in a number of other environmental studies.

Over the past decade, CNES has carried out several GNSS reflectometry-based projects, highlighting the growing use of GNSS in scientific applications and particularly in environmental studies. CNES has also collaborated with M3 Systems on numerous projects since 2016. Notably, M3 Systems has developed a GNSS software receiver with specific reflectometry capabilities for CNES. Closing the circle, CESBIO has had occasion to deploy said M3 Systems GNSS software receiver through its collaboration with CNES.

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Innovative Monitoring Method

When Greenland’s ice sheet melts, the underlying bedrock rises due to reduced pressure. This elevation change, detectable by GPS, translates into precise measurements of ice loss. Valentina Barletta, a senior researcher at DTU Space, explained the significance: “This is the first time we can measure the entire mass loss of the ice sheet day by day.”

The new method, detailed in Geophysical Research Letters, allows for daily monitoring, a significant improvement over previous methods that provided monthly or annual estimates. Greenland loses about 5 cubic kilometers of ice per week, equivalent to draining Denmark’s largest lake, Arresø, 40 times weekly.

Practical Applications and Benefits

The new GPS-based method not only advances climate research but also offers practical benefits, such as flood warnings for Greenland residents. By monitoring daily changes in ice mass, local populations can be warned of potential flooding due to sudden meltwater release, as experienced in Kangerlussuaq in 2012.

The system uses data from the Danish state’s GNET, operated by the Danish Geodata Agency in collaboration with DTU. The GNSS technology, which includes GPS and Galileo, detects sub-millimeter changes in bedrock movement.

Malte Nordmann Winther-Dahl, project manager for GNET, emphasized the importance of maintaining these measurement stations: “We are pleased that data from the GNET stations is so widely used and gives us new opportunities to accurately monitor climate change in Greenland.”

Implications for Climate Science

This method complements existing techniques such as NASA’s GRACE satellites, altimetry satellites, and ice movement measurements, providing a more comprehensive understanding of ice mass loss. The study and the new method were developed in collaboration with DTU Space and DTU Compute, leveraging their expertise and computational power.

The enhanced monitoring capability will aid the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) in making better estimates for future ice sheet melting and its contribution to global sea level rise, thereby improving climate change predictions and response strategies.

Read more about the research via DTU.

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