Snow-covered lake ice in GPS multipath reception – Theory and measurement

Speculary reflected signals from the ground can significantly affect the performance of Global Positioning System receivers. For this type of multipath condition, the received powers are primarily the sum of the speculary reflected and direct signals. These reflected signals can provide useful information about the land-surface composition. In this paper, we discuss the special case of a snow-covered frozen lake, with incident energy at 1.57542 GHz with right-hand circularly polarization at elevation angles between 2° and 40°. The relative received powers are computed and measured for various thicknesses of lake ice. The received powers for both theory and measurement have the same behavior throughout a range of elevation angles. The potential for inferring lake ice thickness is explored for a snow-covered lake ice case study.