gnssrefl is an open source software package for GNSS Interferometric Reflectometry (GNSS-IR).
While it is great to see so many people expressing interest in GNSS-IR and using this software, I cannot answer questions sent to my personal e-mail. All questions must be posted as an issue. This allows tracking of community usage and allows others to benefit if they have the same question. It also provides a forum for other community members to provide their perspective as I am not able to answer every question that is posted.
When showing any results created using gnssrefl, I request that you use:
Larson, K.M., gnssrefl: an open source python software package for environmental GNSS interferometric reflectometry applications, GPS Solutions, Vol. 28(165), 10.1007/s10291-024-01694-8, 2024.
If you use the online Fresnel mapping tool, you should similarly cite this paper as it uses the exact same code.
Documentation:
gnssrefl also has a DOI from zenodo.
Time to upgrade to python 3.10
The latest pypi version can be found here
Latest Features
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There is a more advanced vegetation model available for the soil moisture module.
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You can define your water level measurements with respect to more than one orthometric height. This value is read from the analysis json in both subdaily and daily_avg. Please see the documented inputs to gnssir_input for more information.
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You can set your own leveling time periods for soil moisture (see vwc.py).
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You can estimate LSP in SNR units of dB-Hz. Command line option dbhz.
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Soil moisture can be computed from L1 and L5 data, see e.g. George Townsend PR
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you can set beginning and end dates in
daily_avgandsubdaily. The parameters are called date1 and date2. See the descriptions of these modules in the usual place.
Questions and bug reports for gnssrefl (but not the notebooks) must be submitted via the Issues button at the github repository. The notebooks were created by Earthscope with NASA funding. I formally asked Earthscope about maintenance of the notebooks and received the following response from them:
In general, we place maintenance of notebooks (and many of our apps) that are not in active production on the Low Priority list and I think it would be really healthy for our community to be willing to apply their expertise to provide fixes and enhancements to the notebook collection that can be reviewed in a pull request and merged for deployment.
Questions?
Try looking at old Issues on github. People might have asked your question before. If you found our documentation confusing or lacking, please submit a PR to improve it.
Some older new features:
You can now store coordinates for your local GNSS-IR sites. See file formats for more information. (A bug in this option was fixed in version 3.6.7. The previous version failed when you only had a single station in your file.)
A notebook version of this animation is also available if you would like to try changing parameters.
See documentation for gnssir_input for new refraction models.
How do you find out which version are you running? Any of the major pieces of code (rinex2snr, gnssir, subdaily) should display this information on the first line of the screen output.
If you would like to sign up for the GNSS-IR email list, please contact Melissa Weber at [email protected]
If you want to access CDDIS, including orbits, you should make an account.
If you want to access to any Earthscope data, an account is required.
GNSS-IR was developed with funding from NSF (ATM 0740515, EAR 0948957, AGS 0935725, EAR 1144221, AGS 1449554) and
NASA (NNX12AK21G and NNX13AF43G). gnssrefl was initially developed
as a fun post-retirement project, followed by support from NASA (80NSSC20K1731).
The CRC 1502 DETECT project and the University of Bonn supported this project from 2022-2024.
I am not funded to give courses on using gnssrefl. If you are interested in
hosting a GNSS-IR workshop or short course, please contact one of the chairs of
the IAG study group on GNSS-IR
Kristine M. Larson
Last updated
December 11, 2025