Statistical Analysis of CyGNSS Speckle and Its Applications to Surface Water Mapping

The Global Navigation Satellite System reflectometry (GNSS-R) technique has demonstrated its potential for terrestrial applications. Over inland water bodies, the dominance of coherent components in GNSS-R has been widely recognized. Nevertheless, little attention is given to GNSS-R speckle, which is inherent to coherent imaging systems. In this study, taking the multiplicative speckle into account, we regard GNSS-R coherent scattering as a statistical distribution. First, the expression of the statistical distribution is identified and parameterized using observations from the Cyclone Global Navigation Satellite System (CyGNSS). The results suggest that the power tends to obey a three-degrees-of-freedom distribution model. Second, the multilook statistics of CyGNSS, such as the mean value and the coefficient of variation (CV), are analyzed on different spatial–temporal scales. Finally, we realize surface water mapping using multilook statistics. Comparison with the state-of-the-art algorithms shows that the proposed method can effectively improve the goodness of water mapping, with higher overall accuracies (~0.97) and F1 scores (~0.60). This study provides new insights into future GNSS-R land observations.