Work

Freeze–Thaw State Detection over the Mid-to-High Latitudes of the Northern Hemisphere Using Tianmu-1 Multi-GNSS-R

Year: 2026

Type: article

Abstract: Freeze–thaw (F/T) processes play a critical role in the regulation of soil hydrothermal dynamics, land–atmosphere energy exchange, and ecosystem functioning. The spaceborne global navigation satellite system reflectometry (GNSS-R) has shown great potential for land surface F/T state detection; however, its monitoring capability remains limited by spatial resolution, revisit interval, observation coverage, and complex land surface conditions. In this study, Tianmu-1 (TM-1) multi-GNSS-R observations were used to detect daily land surface F/T states over the mid-to-high latitudes of the Northern Hemisphere. First, surface reflectivity observations from multi-GNSS, including the Global Positioning System (GPS), BeiDou Navigation Satellite System (BDS), Galileo, and GLONASS, were fused using a weighted averaging method based on the number of specular reflection points. Then, TM-1 multi-GNSS-R reflectivity was used as the primary remote-sensing input, while vegetation water content (VWC), surface roughness, and snow cover information were introduced as auxiliary environmental variables. The Soil Moisture Active Passive (SMAP) F/T product was used to provide supervised reference labels for developing Bayesian-optimized extreme gradient boosting (XGBoost) models for F/T state classification. Evaluation against SMAP F/T reference labels showed that the multi-GNSS fusion model achieved an area under the curve (AUC) of 0.853 and an overall accuracy of 77.3% without incorporating snow cover information, outperforming the single-GNSS models. After incorporating snow cover information, the AUC increased to 0.959, and the overall accuracy reached 89.3%. Shapley additive explanations (SHAP) analysis further showed that snow cover made the largest contribution to the final model output, suggesting that its improvement effect may reflect both physical snow-related surface information and seasonal contextual information. An independent point-based comparison with in situ observations from the international soil moisture network (ISMN) showed that the TM-1 F/T classification accuracy reached 85.2% after incorporating snow cover information, which was comparable to that of the SMAP product. These results demonstrate that TM-1 multi-GNSS-R observations have promising potential for detecting land surface F/T states during the autumn–winter freezing development period, and that integrating multi-GNSS-R reflectivity with snow cover information can substantially improve classification performance and spatial consistency within the available observation period.

Source: Remote Sensing

DOI: 10.3390/rs18142369

Authors: Jinsheng Tu, Xiaolei Wang, Weiao Yong, Xinzhe Xu, Hao Yang

Institution: Hohai University

Language: English

Topic: Soil Moisture and Remote Sensing

Subfield: Environmental Engineering

Field: Environmental Science

Domain: Physical Sciences

SDG: Climate action

Open Access status: gold

Estimated APC paid: $3,258