Identification

Title

Improved Mapping of Tropospheric Delays

Abstract

The authors compare several methods to map the a priori tropospheric delay of global positioning system (GPS) signals from the zenith direction to lower elevations. This is commonly achieved with so-called mapping functions. Dry mapping functions are applied to the hydrostatic delay; wet mapping functions are used to map the zenith wet delay to lower elevation angles. The authors compared the following mapping techniques against raytraced delays computed for radiosonde profiles under the assumption of spherical symmetry: (a) the Niell mapping function; (b) mapping through the COSPAR International Reference Atmosphere with added water vapor climatology; (c) the same as b with added use of surface meteorological temperature, pressure, and humidity; and (d) use of the numerical reanalysis model of the National Centers for Environmental Prediction-National Center for Atmospheric Research. Based on comparisons with all available global radiosondes (1000 per day), for every fifth day of 1997 (73 days), the authors found that dry mapping based on method d performs 2 - 3 times better than a for elevations 15° and below. The authors further report that b and c perform better dry mapping than a, with an improvement of 50%. Smaller improvements are also shown for wet delay mapping by b, c, and d as compared to a. At 5° and below, the Niell dry mapping function has biases that vary with season by 1%, and it displays significant systematic errors (2% - 4% at 5° elevation) between 30° and 90° southern latitude during the northern winter months. It is concluded that the most demanding meteorological and geodetic GPS applications should use location- and time-specific "direct" mapping functions such as b, c, or d rather than parameterized functions, especially if low elevation observations are used. The authors describe how this improved mapping can be implemented in GPS analysis software.

Resource type

document

Resource locator

Unique resource identifier

code

http://n2t.net/ark:/85065/d71c1x17

codeSpace

Dataset language

eng

Spatial reference system

code identifying the spatial reference system

Classification of spatial data and services

Topic category

geoscientificInformation

Keywords

Keyword set

keyword value

Text

originating controlled vocabulary

title

Resource Type

reference date

date type

publication

effective date

2016-01-01T00:00:00Z

Geographic location

West bounding longitude

East bounding longitude

North bounding latitude

South bounding latitude

Temporal reference

Temporal extent

Begin position

End position

Dataset reference date

date type

publication

effective date

2001-07-01T00:00:00Z

Frequency of update

Quality and validity

Lineage

Conformity

Data format

name of format

version of format

Constraints related to access and use

Constraint set

Use constraints

Copyright 2001 American Meteorological Society (AMS). Permission to use figures, tables, and brief excerpts from this work in scientific and educational works is hereby granted provided that the source is acknowledged. Any use of material in this work that is determined to be "fair use" under Section 107 or that satisfies the conditions specified in Section 108 of the U.S. Copyright Law (17 USC, as revised by P.L. 94-553) does not require the Society's permission. Republication, systematic reproduction, posting in electronic form on servers, or other uses of this material, except as exempted by the above statements, requires written permission or license from the AMS. Additional details are provided in the AMS Copyright Policies, available from the AMS at 617-227-2425 or amspubs@ametsoc.org. Permission to place a copy of this work on this server has been provided by the AMS. The AMS does not guarantee that the copy provided here is an accurate copy of the published work.

Limitations on public access

None

Responsible organisations

Responsible party

contact position

OpenSky Support

organisation name

UCAR/NCAR - Library

full postal address

PO Box 3000

Boulder

80307-3000

email address

opensky@ucar.edu

web address

http://opensky.ucar.edu/

name: homepage

responsible party role

pointOfContact

Metadata on metadata

Metadata point of contact