Ground surface elevation changes over permafrost areas revealed by multiple GNSS interferometric reflectometry

Ground subsidence and uplift caused by the annual thawing and freezing of the active layer are important variables in permafrost studies. Global positioning system interferometric reflectometry (GPS-IR) has been successfully applied to retrieve the continuous ground surface movements in permafrost areas. However, only GPS signals were used in previous studies. In this study, using multiple global navigation satellite system (GNSS) signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) observations recorded by a GNSS station SG27 in Utqiaġvik, Alaska during the period from 2018 to 2021, we applied multiple GNSS-IR (multi-GNSS-IR) technique to the SNR data and obtained the complete and continuous ground surface elevation changes over the permafrost area at a daily interval in snow-free seasons in 2018 and 2019. The GLONASS-IR and Galileo-IR measurements agreed with the GPS-IR measurements at L1 frequency, which are the most consistent measurements among all multi-GNSS measurements, in terms of the overall subsidence trend but clearly showed periodic noises. We proposed a method to reconstruct the GLONASS- and Galileo-IR elevation changes by specifically grouping and fitting them with a composite model. Compared with GPS L1 results, the unbiased root mean square error (RMSE) of the reconstructed Galileo measurements reduced by 50.0% and 42.2% in 2018 and 2019, respectively, while the unbiased RMSE of the reconstructed GLONASS measurements decreased by 41.8% and 25.8% in 2018 and 2019, respectively. Fitting the composite model to the combined multi-GNSS-IR, we obtained seasonal displacements of − 3.27 ± 0.13 cm (R2 = 0.763) and − 10.56 ± 0.10 cm (R2 = 0.912) in 2018 and 2019, respectively. Moreover, we found that the abnormal summer heave was strongly correlated with rain events, implying hydrological effects on the ground surface elevation changes. Our study shows the feasibility of multi-GNSS-IR in permafrost areas for the first time. Multi-GNSS-IR opens up a great opportunity for us to investigate ground surface movements over permafrost areas with multi-source observations, which are important for our robust analysis and quantitative understanding of frozen ground dynamics under climate change.