Estimating Zenith Tropospheric Delays from BeiDou Navigation Satellite System Observations

Sensors

Aigong Xu²  Zongqiu Xu²  Maorong Ge¹  Xinchao Xu²  Huizhong Zhu² 

[1] Department of Geodesy and Remote Sensing, German Research Center for Geosciences, Potsdam 14473, Germany;School of Geomatics, Liaoning Technical University, No. 47 Zhonghua Road, Fuxin 123000, China; E-Mails:

关键词: BeiDou navigation satellite system;    precise point positioning;    network solution;    GNSS meteorology;   

DOI  :  10.3390/s130404514

来源: mdpi

【 摘 要 】

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.

【 授权许可】

CC BY   
© 2013 by the authors; licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland.