Validating surface water levels from Space

The Challenge

Understanding our accurate location on Earth can spur innovation, investment, and the next generation of technology. Not just for individuals, but for industry, government, and academia.

Correcting data from satellites ensures high accuracy positioning and navigation across various systems, technologies, and devices. In the environmental and resource sectors, where issues like water quality and climate change are addressed, accurate satellite information is crucial for national and global assessments and future predictions.

Real-time centimetre-level positioning accuracy can be challenging to obtain in general, but especially from current devices by those who are not experts in GNSS. However, achieving this level of accuracy is necessary for a wide range of researchers and experts in different fields, to obtain optimal data to better inform predictions and inform future decisions.

The Solution

Ginan is paving the way to solve these challenges by making precise location data even more accessible. Ginan is a Global Navigation Satellite System (GNSS) Analysis Centre Software that delivers real-time corrections and additional products as an open-source toolkit to enable precise point positioning.

Ginan is free and open, operates in real-time, and offers centimetre-level accuracy, as well as providing post-processing options. Due to its high level of adaptability and integration anyone can apply Ginan to support their innovation projects and programs as a positioning and navigation solution.

Ginan's versatility was put to the test in a collaboration between CSIRO, Geoscience Australia, and FrontierSI. The goal was to provide real-time centimetre-level accuracy to help inform CSIRO’s experiment on Googong Dam, aimed at calibrating and validating Earth Observation satellite data by measuring water level heights.

For this to be achieved, Ginan-in-a-box was deployed on a floating pontoon on the dam for over a month to conduct data analysis on water level determination. The success of Ginan in this environment is just one example of the many applications to which it can be applied.

• Ginan's precise positioning enabled accurate water level measurements, crucial for environmental monitoring;
• This deployment demonstrated Ginan's capability to perform real-time data analysis on platforms in challenging environments;
• Ginan contributed to an improved ability to make informed predictions on water quality impacts using machine learning and AI;
• The experiment showcased the potential of low-cost, high-accuracy positioning software to support R&D projects delivering benefits to society.

The Impact

Ginan's performance in this project highlights the potential of this low-cost, high-accuracy positioning software to impact projects in various environments, contributing to Australian society. Ginan-in-a-box is an innovative piece of equipment capable of being deployed in a wide range of scenarios.

Ginan’s unique modelling and analytic systems for multi-GNSS processing in real-time deliver precise positioning products to the Australian and international PNT community. The open-source tools used to analyse GNSS data enable industry, researchers, students and organisations to apply the software to help solve complex problems.