Leveraging Nisar Activities to Support CYGNSS Wetlands Calibration & Validation

The extended mission of NASA’s CYGNSS satellite constellation has a new focus on land applications, and the CYGNSS Science Team is actively performing land calibration/validation for soil moisture and other surface properties. At the same time, CYGNSS is also producing exciting new terrestrial surface water observations with applications for monitoring wetland extent and detecting dynamic inland inundations. Several recent studies have highlighted the ability of CYGNSS to estimate inundation extent, including over vegetated inland water. However, calibration/validation of wetlands is more complicated and requires in-situ sensors and complementary remote sensing measurements of water extent and vegetation in heterogeneous scenes with complex geometries. This paper is meant to highlight the unique opportunity to leverage the large investment in wetlands validation for NASA’s and ISRO’s NISAR Mission to also support CYGNSS (and general GNSS-R) inland water and wetlands cal/val.