As an emerging observational method, spaceborne global navigation satellite system-reflectometry (GNSS-R) has been applied recently for significant wave height (SWH) retrieval. However, the complexity of the sea surface and the influence of multiple potential factors have been constraining the accuracy of SWH retrieval. This study verified the effect of sea surface temperature (SST), sea surface salinity (SSS), and seasonal variation on cyclone-GNSS (CYGNSS) observables for the first time. After controlling for the SWH, the CYGNSS observables exhibit a dependence on SST and SSS, where the dependence on SST dominates. The correlation coefficient (R) between SST and CYGNSS observables is the highest in 3.5–4 m, which is 0.53. In addition, the geographical distribution of retrieval bias exhibits seasonality. Therefore, seasonal factors can provide an additional contribution to SWH retrieval. SWH retrieval is based on the multilayer perceptron. The European center for medium-range weather forecast reanalysis 5th Generation SWH data were used as the reference for the computation of retrieval performance metrics. The results show that after considering SST, salinity, and season, the root mean square error (RMSE) of the retrieved SWH decreases from 0.65 to 0.48 m and the R increases from 0.66 to 0.83. The retrievals were compared to the ground truth measurements from the National Data Buoy Center buoys; the RMSE decreased from 0.52–1.07 m to 0.30–0.61 m, and the R increased from 0.44–0.71 to 0.60–0.78.

作为一种新兴的观测方法，星载全球导航卫星系统反射测量（GNSS-R）最近已应用于有效波高（SWH）反演。然而，海面的复杂性和多种潜在因素的影响一直制约着SWH反演的准确性。该研究首次验证了海面温度（SST）、海面盐度（SSS）和季节变化对气旋-GNSS（CYGNSS）观测值的影响。在控制了SWH后，CYGNSS可观测量表现出对SST和SSS的依赖性，其中对SST的依赖性占主导地位。SST 与 CYGNSS 观测值的相关系数（R）在 3.5~4 m 范围内最高，为 0.53。此外，检索偏差的地理分布表现出季节性。因此，季节性因素可以为 SWH 检索提供额外的贡献。SWH 检索基于多层感知器。欧洲中期天气预报再分析中心第五代SWH数据被用作计算检索性能指标的参考。结果表明，考虑SST、盐度和季节后，反演SWH的均方根误差(RMSE)从0.65减小到0.48 m，R从0.66增大到0.83。将检索结果与国家数据浮标中心浮标的地面实况测量值进行比较；RMSE从0.52-1.07 m下降到0.30-0.61 m，R从0.44-0.71增加到0.60-0.78。