The GNSS derived Zenith Tropospheric Delay (ZTD) plays today a very critical role in meteorological study and weather forecasts, as ZTDs of thousands of GNSS stations are operationally assimilated into numerical weather prediction models. Recently, the Chinese BeiDou Navigation Satellite System (BDS) was officially announced to provide operational services around China and its neighborhood and it was demonstrated to be very promising for precise navigation and positioning. In this contribution, we concentrate on estimating ZTD using BDS observations to assess its capacity for troposphere remote sensing. A local network which is about 250 km from Beijing and comprised of six stations equipped with GPS- and BDS-capable receivers is utilized. Data from 5 to 8 November 2012 collected on the network is processed in network mode using precise orbits and in Precise Point Positioning mode using precise orbits and clocks. The precise orbits and clocks are generated from a tracking network with most of the stations in China and several stations around the world. The derived ZTDs are compared with that estimated from GPS data using the final products of the International GNSS Service (IGS). The comparison shows that the bias and the standard deviation of the ZTD differences are about 2 mm and 5 mm, respectively, which are very close to the differences of GPS ZTD estimated using different software packages.

The global navigation satellite system reflectometer (GNSS-R) can improve the observation and inversion of mesoscale by increasing the spatial coverage of ocean surface observations. The traditional retracking method is an empirical model with lower accuracy and condenses the Delay-Doppler Map information to a single scalar metric cannot completely represent the sea surface height (SSH) information. Firstly, to use multi-dimensional inputs for SSH retrieval, this paper constructs a new machine learning weighted average fusion feature extraction method based on the machine learning fusion model and feature extraction, which takes airborne delay waveform (DW) data as input and SSH as output. R2-Ranking method is used for weighted fusion, and the weights are distributed by the coefficient of determination of cross validation on the training set. Moreover, based on the airborne delay waveform data set, three features that are sensitive to the height of the sea surface are constructed, including the delay of the 70% peak correlation power (PCP70), the waveform leading edge peak first derivative (PFD), and the leading edge slope (LES). The effect of feature sets with varying levels of information details are analyzed as well. Secondly, the global average sea surface DTU15, which has been corrected by tides, is used to verify the reliability of the new machine learning weighted average fusion feature extraction method. The results show that the best retrieval performance can be obtained by using DW, PCP70 and PFD features. Compared with the DTU15 model, the root mean square error is about 0.23 m, and the correlation coefficient is about 0.75. Thirdly, the retrieval performance of the new machine learning weighted average fusion feature extraction method and the traditional single-point re-tracking method are compared and analyzed. The results show that the new machine learning weighted average fusion feature extraction method can effectively improve the precision of SSH retrieval, in which the mean absolute error is reduced by 63.1 and 59.2% respectively, and the root mean square error is reduced by 63.3 and 61.8% respectively; The correlation coefficient increased by 31.6 and 44.2% respectively. This method will provide the theoretical method support for the future GNSS-R SSH altimetry verification satellite.

On 27 December 2012 it was announced officially that the Chinese Navigation Satellite System BeiDou (BDS) was able to provide operational services over the Asia-Pacific region. The quality of BDS observations was confirmed as comparable with those of GPS, and relative positioning in static and kinematic modes were also demonstrated to be very promising. As Precise Point Positioning (PPP) technology is widely recognized as a method of precise positioning service, especially in real-time, in this contribution we concentrate on the PPP performance using BDS data only. BDS PPP in static, kinematic and simulated real-time kinematic mode is carried out for a regional network with six stations equipped with GPSand BDS-capable receivers, using precise satellite orbits and clocks estimated from a global BDS tracking network. To validate the derived positions and trajectories, they are compared to the daily PPP solution using GPS data. The assessment confirms that the performance of BDS PPP is very comparable with GPS in terms of both convergence time and accuracy. K E Y

No abstract

The angular position measurement of an array antenna based on a wireless signal has high accuracy in an indoor no-occlusion environment. However, due to the high complexity of indoor environments, signal occlusion, multipath, and other interfering factors are inevitable when users move randomly, which can greatly reduce the positioning accuracy. In addition, different directions of the positioning source signal can also affect the positioning result. The switching wheels of the dual-polarization antenna array are collected in channel 1, the fast Fourier transform (FFT) is applied to the data of channel 2 to estimate the frequency offset, and the phase of the data is compensated. Using the FFT frequency offset estimation, the high-precision positioning of a single base station is realized using the dual-channel switch and dual-polarization antenna array in turn. Aiming at analyzing the affecting factors of the positioning system accuracy, the strong tracking kalman filter algorithm is studied. At the same time, the singular value decomposition of the covariance matrix is performed to improve the robustness of the strong tracking kalman filter, and the adaptive factor is introduced to improve the filtering accuracy. The proposed positioning algorithm can achieve the positioning accuracy within 1 m in the coverage area in a line-of-sight (LOS) environment, while the dynamic positioning accuracy within 1 m cannot be guaranteed in the coverage area in a non-line-of-sight (NLOS) environment. On this basis, the analysis of the static, rotational, and dynamic positioning accuracies of the source in the LOS and NLOS environments shows that the proposed singular value decomposition strong tracking kalman filter (SVD-STKF) algorithm can improve the overall positioning accuracy of the system by 0.03 m, and the maximum error in the LOS environment can be reduced by 0.08 m. The proposed SVD-STKF algorithm can correct the Hausdorff distance of dynamic positioning by up to 0.513 m in the NLOS environment where the system’s positioning accuracy decreases sharply due to the signal shielding. Also, it can make the positioning results smoother and achieve a good correction effect for the points far away from the true trajectory.