Creativity Prize: the GPS Reflections Group led by Dr. Kristine M. Larson (University of Colorado, Boulder), and including Dr. Eric Small (University of Colorado), Dr. Valery Zavorotny (NOAA) and Dr. John Braun (UCAR).
The team is being awarded the Creativity Prize for their discovery that standard geodetic GPS instruments are sensitive to hydrological influences and the subsequent development of a new, unexpected, and cost-effective technique, GPS Interferometric Reflectometry (GPS-IR), to measure soil moisture, snow depth, and vegetation water content.
GPS-IR is based on the discovery that the “noise” (interference pattern) observed with ordinary GPS instruments correlates with the water content of the reflecting surface in the vicinity of the receiving antenna.
This method of measuring soil moisture complements the cosmic ray technique (COSMOS) of Dr. Marek Zreda and Dr. Darin Desilets, a work previously honored by the Prince Sultan Bin Abdulaziz International Prize for Water back in 2010. Whereas COSMOS provides soil moisture averages over a circular area of radius 300 m to a depth of several decimeters, continuously-operating GPS receivers can be used to estimate soil moisture variations over areas of radius 50 m to a maximum depth of 6 cm, with greatest sensitivity to the upper 1 cm of soil depth at near saturation. Furthermore, GPS-IR has the advantage of relying on an existing GPS infrastructure installed by surveyors and geoscientists that covers an increasingly large portion of the global surface (including more than 12,000 continuously-operating GPS systems on and near a wide range of soil and vegetation types around the world). Its ability to reliably measure and track snow depth is extremely important because on-site snow distribution data are sparse and remotely sensed data are imprecise as well as coarse-scale. The ability of GPS-IR to sense and track vegetation growth complements conventional remote sensing data that have limited temporal coverage and do not work well in the presence of clouds.
The Council for the Prince Sultan Bin Abdulaziz International Prize for Water has announced the winners of its 6th Award (2014). The announcement was made at the Prize Council meeting, which was held in Riyadh on 12 October 2014 and presided over by PSIPW Council chairman, HRH Prince Khaled Bin Sultan Bin Abdulaziz. The Awards Ceremony will be held in Riyadh on 1 December 2014, concurrently with the 6th International Conference on Water Resources and Arid Environments (ICWRAE 6), which will run from 2-4 December 2014.
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