Within the German-Indonesian Tsunami Early Warning System project GITEWS (Rudloff et al., 2009), a feasibility study on a future tsunami detection system from space has been carried out. The Global Navigation Satellite System Reflectometry (GNSS-R) is an innovative way of using reflected GNSS signals for remote sensing, e.g. sea surface altimetry. In contrast to conventional satellite radar altimetry, multiple height measurements within a wide field of view can be made simultaneously. With a dedicated Low Earth Orbit (LEO) constellation of satellites equipped with GNSS-R, densely spaced sea surface height measurements could be established to detect tsunamis. This simulation study compares the Walker and the meshed comb constellation with respect to their global reflection point distribution. The detection performance of various LEO constellation scenarios with GPS, GLONASS and Galileo as signal sources is investigated. Read More
