[1] The atmospheric excess path delay is a major contributor to the error budget of space geodetic positioning applications and should therefore be reduced to the maximum possible extent. Numerical weather models are undergoing improvements with regard to their spatial resolution, which enables the compensation of troposphere propagation errors by applying corrections obtained from ray-tracing through three-dimensional meteorologic fields. Since in the selection of the locations of the grid points priority is given to the requirements of meteorologists rather than the facilitation of efficient ray-tracing algorithms, we propose a method that can resample and refine the large data cubes onto regular grids using a sophisticated and fast method developed at the National Institute of Information and Communications Technology (NICT). Once these data sets are generated, ray-tracing algorithms can be applied in order to compute atmospheric excess path delays in real time for several users using off-the-shelf PCs. We present three different ray-tracing strategies and discuss their advantages and bottlenecks with regard to accuracy and data throughput.Citation: Hobiger, T., R. Ichikawa, Y. Koyama, and T. Kondo (2008), Fast and accurate ray-tracing algorithms for real-time space geodetic applications using numerical weather models,
In order to study small-scale water vapor variations over distances from a few km to 20 km, two campaign observations with a dense GPS network were carried out for 2.5 months in total at Tsukuba, Japan. For the observations 79 GPS antennas were installed at 75 sites within a 20 km by 20 km square area, at 1 to 3 km intervals.The PCV models provided by the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) were applied to remove unmodeled phase center variation (PCV) specific to GPS antenna type. In addition, new PCV maps (MPS map) were constructed for all the antennas by stacking one-way postfit residuals over both campaign periods, to remove not only azimuth dependent PCV, but also the errors due to multipath effects.After MPS maps were introduced into the analysis, strong elevation dependence as well as azimuth dependence of postfit phase residuals, almost disappeared for all the antennas. In addition, the time variations in postfit residuals which were common to all the GPS sites, were subtracted to remove satellite orbits and/or clock errors. This led to the accurate estimate of slant path delay (SPD), which enabled the SPD to be applied to tomography analyses of water vapor (Seko et al. 2003). The horizontal scale of SPD was estimated using correlation distributions. As a result, the horizontal scale of the zenith total delay, the gradient component, and the postfit residual may be roughly considered as 644 G 120 km, 62 G 23 km, and 2-3 km, respectively.Improvement of the postfit residuals following the application of MPS maps also showed a positive impact on PWV estimation. Systematic biases of GPS derived PWV between different antenna types (Trimble and Ashtech) were reduced, resulting in a better agreement of GPS PWV, with RMS errors of 2.0 mm or less relative to PWV by rawinsonde or water vapor radiometer observations. The distribution of time-averaged PWV estimated at the 75 GPS sites showed a systematic pattern which has a negative correlation with the antenna height of each site.
Precise satellite orbits and clock information for global navigation satellite systems (GNSS) allow zerodifference position solutions, also known as precise point positioning (PPP) to be calculated. In recent years numerical weather models (NWM) have undergone an improvement of spatial and temporal resolution. This makes them not only useful for the computation of mapping functions but also allows slant troposphere delays from ray-tracing to be obtained. For this study, such ray-traced troposphere corrections have been applied to code and phase observations of 13 sites from the International GNSS Service (IGS) receiver network, which are located inside the boundaries of the Japanese Meteorological Agency (JMA) meso-scale weather model, covering a period of 4 months. The results from this approach are presented together with a comparison to standard PPP processing results. Moreover the advantages and caveats of the introduction of ray-traced slant delays for precise point positioning are discussed.
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