Airport near Victorville, CA

Warning

scia

Location: Victorville, California, USA

Archive: UNAVCO

Station Page at UNAVCO

Station Page at Nevada Geodetic Laboratory

L2C data are available at UNAVCO in the standard RINEX files for this site starting in 2018.

Translate the SNR data/Estimate RH

rinex2snr scia 2018 1 -archive unavco -doy_end 366 -year_end 2020

Take a quick look at the L2C data:

quickLook scia 2018 1 -fr 20

../_images/quicklook_scia.png ../_images/quicklook_scia2.png

These are Lovely reflections!

Set up (default) analysis stratgegy:

gnssir_input scia -l2c T

Estimate reflector heights:

gnssir scia 2018 1 -doy_end 365 -year_end 2020

Estimate Soil Moisture

Please read the soil moisture user manual. It is very short and has a lot of tips that will save you time.

We need a list of satellite tracks to use. We’ll use 2019 for now as the year:

vwc_input scia 2019

Estimate the phase for each satellite track on each day:

phase scia 2018 1 -doy_end 366 -year_end 2020

Finally, convert the phase to volumetric water content. To make it easier to look at the plots, I’ll just show the first two years:

vwc scia 2018 -year_end 2019

Phase results plotted in geographic coordinates:

../_images/scia_1.png

Daily average phase:

../_images/scia_2.png

What is going on at the end of 2019? A little googling:

../_images/powerfulstorm.png

If it is just rain, that’s ok. If it is snow, that last very high point in 2019 is contaminated. This site says it was snow!

Final plot:

../_images/scia_4.png

VWC results are written to:

$REFL_CODE/Files/scia/scia_vwc.txt

Let’s try to get rid of that snow outlier. I could look in the vwc file to see what day has a very large value. Or you can also try setting -snow_filter to True. When I ran it, it did not create a snow outlier file - but it did tell me where it is stored and what format it needed (year and day of year).

$REFL_CODE/Files/scia/snowmask_scia.txt

So I went ahead and made that file with one line in it, 2019 361

Then I ran the vwc code again:

vwc scia 2018 -year_end 2019 -snow_filter T

Produces:

../_images/scia_2years.png

Now let’s look at three years:

vwc scia 2018 -year_end 2020 -snow_filter T

../_images/scia_3years.png

There is what appears to be a big precipitation event followed by a drydown in April 2020. What does the weather station say?