Abstract
In this study, a tropospheric delay model that integrates tropospheric delays derived from the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts fifth-generation global atmospheric reanalysis and the Continuously Operating Reference Station (CORS) network observations in mountainous areas is established, which is then applied to improve GNSS precise point positioning (PPP). Observations of GNSS stations in the Great Dividing Range of eastern Australia are selected for the experiments. The performance of zenith wet delay (ZWD) retrieved from the integrated tropospheric model is evaluated with comparisons to precise point positioning (PPP) estimated ZWD values. Results show that the average root-mean-square value for ZWDs of the integrated tropospheric model is 8.03 mm for the eastern Australian CORS network, showing an improvement of 14.0% compared to that of the CORS interpolation model. Besides, the proposed tropospheric model is applied to regional augmentation precise positioning. Results present that the average positioning accuracy of the tropospheric model-corrected PPP solutions is 1.42 cm, 1.39 cm and 2.90 cm for the east, north and vertical components, respectively, revealing an improvement of 14.5%, 11.5% and 18.6% compared to the PPP solutions with regional CORS corrections. Meanwhile, almost all stations can achieve a faster solution convergence by performing the integrated tropospheric model-corrected PPP. All these results demonstrate the promising potential of the proposed tropospheric model in enhancing precise positioning as well as facilitating applications in the meteorological fields.
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GNSS Data are provided by the Geoscience Australia GNSS Data Centre which can be accessed from https://gnss.ga.gov.au/. The reanalysis data provided by the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts (ECMWF) are available at https://cds.climate.copernicus.eu.
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Acknowledgements
This study is financially supported by the National Key R&D Program of China (2021YFC3000504), the National Natural Science Foundation of China (No. 41974029, No. 41876106), the Fellowship of China Postdoctoral Science Foundation (2020M682481) and Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities (2042021kf0005). We also thank the Geoscience Australia GNSS Data Centre for providing GNSS observations, the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts (ECMWF) for online climate data. The numerical calculations in this paper have been done on the supercomputing system in the Supercomputing Center of Wuhan University.
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Lu, C., Zhong, Y., Wu, Z. et al. A tropospheric delay model to integrate ERA5 and GNSS reference network for mountainous areas: application to precise point positioning. GPS Solut 27, 81 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10291-023-01425-5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10291-023-01425-5