资源环境科技发展态势分析平台

The ongoing COVID‐19 pandemic has imposed tight mobility restrictions in urban areas, causing substantial reduction in roadway traffic. Many public parking lots are nearly vacant as people across the world have gone on lockdown since mid‐March. This environmental change may have impacts on GNSS sensors installed on roof of buildings. Here, we use a monitoring site in Boston to exemplify a likely sensitivity of precise GNSS sensors to their nearby dynamic environments including parked vehicles in parking lots. We show that reduced number of parked vehicles since March 23 has decreased the reflector roughness, resulting in an increase in the reflected signal power whose amplitude is quantified by GNSS interferometric reflectometry (IR) technique. The uncertainty of retrieved GNSS antenna height drops with beginning of lockdown, allowing more accurate estimate of reflector height which could have a general implication for better understanding of the fundamental limitations of the technique.