ANZ’s Cal/Val campaigns of satellite, airborne and ground GNSS sensing of soil moisture.
The Challenge
Irrigation accounts for most of the agricultural water use, consuming over half of all freshwater in Australia and New Zealand. Drought, bushfires, declining groundwater, and basin-wide storage reduction are putting increasing pressure on water resources both regionally and globally. Despite this, field-scale irrigation decisions often rely on point-based soil moisture probes, which provide limited spatial coverage and may not accurately reflect the true water needs across entire fields. This mismatch leads to inefficient water use, undermining efforts to manage one of our most critical and stressed resources. There is a pressing need for scalable, spatially representative solutions to guide efficient irrigation and ensure long-term water sustainability.
Partners
University of Newcastle, University of Canterbury and FrontierSI. The project is co-funded by SmartSat Cooperative Research Centre (SmartSat) and the Ministry of Business Innovation & Employment (MBIE).
The Solution
This project demonstrated the design and field deployment of a ground-borne, low-cost Global Navigation Satellite System Interferometric Reflectometry (GNSS-IR) system and the application of airborne GNSS Reflectometry (GNSS-R) system for near-surface soil moisture monitoring. Both systems were developed to address the challenge of acquiring continuous field-scale soil moisture variations, which is vital for applications in hydrology and agriculture but is not adequately provided by the existing point-scale or coarse-resolution satellite technology.
Impact
This work successfully demonstrated use of GNSS signals from ground and aircraft for capturing soil moisture dynamics at spatial and temporal scales complementary to existing methods. The findings and methodologies presented lay a foundation for further research and application of GNSS-based environmental monitoring.
Contact
To learn more, contact FrontierSI at contact@frontiersi.com.au.