The hydrological changes of the Yellow River are complex,and the existing water level monitoring methods are time-consuming and laborious and cannot well meet the requirements of both time resolution and spatial resolution.The emergence of ground-based GPS-IR technology provides a new approach for water level monitoring,but the receivers currently used in most ground-based GPS-IR technologies are high-precision geodetic receivers,which are costly and weak in timeliness thus are not suitable for wide application.This article first introduces the composition of the universal GPS receiver and analyzes the quality of GPS observation data,then gives out the basic principle of ground-based GPS-IR technology for water level monitoring.Finally,the GPS-IR water level data are extracted from GPS data measured by the Yellow River Yanguo Gorge,which are then compared with the water level monitoring data of Lanzhou Hydrometric Station.The experimental results show that the water levels retrieved by universal GPS receiver are accurate with the best RMSE being 0.21 m,verifying the applicability of universal GPS receiver for long-term water level monitoring.