GNSS+R 2012 follows a sequence of ad hoc meetings organized in the United States and Europe, starting with a NASA-Sponsored meeting at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI) in 2002.  The following meetings were organized by various groups independently to continue the exchange of technical and scientific information related to the utilization of GNSS reflectometry.

The Barcelona meeting of 2010 was the first GNSS-R meeting to by co-sponsored by the IEEE Geoscience and Remote Sensing Society. Selected papers from the proceedings were also published in a special issue of Radio Science [Vol. 46, No. 6, 2011].  This marked an important step in the recognition of reflectometry as a serious remote sensing technique and area of current research interest.