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Modeling tropospheric wet delays with national GNSS reference network in China for BeiDou precise point positioning

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Abstract

During past decades, precise point positioning (PPP) has been proven to be a well-known positioning technique for centimeter or decimeter level accuracy. However, it needs long convergence time to get high-accuracy positioning, which limits the prospects of PPP, especially in real-time applications. It is expected that the PPP convergence time can be reduced by introducing high-quality external information, such as ionospheric or tropospheric corrections. In this study, several methods for tropospheric wet delays modeling over wide areas are investigated. A new, improved model is developed, applicable in real-time applications in China. Based on the GPT2w model, a modified parameter of zenith wet delay exponential decay wrt. height is introduced in the modeling of the real-time tropospheric delay. The accuracy of this tropospheric model and GPT2w model in different seasons is evaluated with cross-validation, the root mean square of the zenith troposphere delay (ZTD) is 1.2 and 3.6 cm on average, respectively. On the other hand, this new model proves to be better than the tropospheric modeling based on water-vapor scale height; it can accurately express tropospheric delays up to 10 km altitude, which potentially has benefits in many real-time applications. With the high-accuracy ZTD model, the augmented PPP convergence performance for BeiDou navigation satellite system (BDS) and GPS is evaluated. It shows that the contribution of the high-quality ZTD model on PPP convergence performance has relation with the constellation geometry. As BDS constellation geometry is poorer than GPS, the improvement for BDS PPP is more significant than that for GPS PPP. Compared with standard real-time PPP, the convergence time is reduced by 2–7 and 20–50% for the augmented BDS PPP, while GPS PPP only improves about 6 and 18% (on average), in horizontal and vertical directions, respectively. When GPS and BDS are combined, the geometry is greatly improved, which is good enough to get a reliable PPP solution, the augmentation PPP improves insignificantly comparing with standard PPP.

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Acknowledgements

This work is funded by State Key Research and Development Programme (2016YFB0501802) and supported by the National Nature Science Foundation of China (No. 41374034).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. GNSS Research Center, Wuhan University, 129 Luoyu Road, Wuhan, 430079, China

    Fu Zheng, Yidong Lou, Shengfeng Gu, **aopeng Gong & Chuang Shi

  2. School of Electronic and Information Engineering, Beihang University, 37 Xueyuan Road, Bei**g, 100083, China

    Chuang Shi

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  1. Fu Zheng
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  2. Yidong Lou
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  3. Shengfeng Gu
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  4. **aopeng Gong
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  5. Chuang Shi
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Correspondence to Yidong Lou.

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Zheng, F., Lou, Y., Gu, S. et al. Modeling tropospheric wet delays with national GNSS reference network in China for BeiDou precise point positioning. J Geod 92, 545–560 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00190-017-1080-4

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00190-017-1080-4

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