A Controlled Ground-Based Experiment to Assess the Capabilities of GNSS-R for Marine Litter Detection in a Flume

Detection of marine litter is an urgent task given the large amount of plastics that end up in all water systems. This manuscript provides the description and results obtained from a ground-based Global Navigation Satellite System - Reflectometry (GNSS-R) system built in a controlled indoor environment intended to test the capabilities of GNSS-R techniques for marine litter detection, when different wave conditions and plastic litter were used. Results show that it may be possible to detect the damping of waves produced by the accumulations of some types of plastic.