Identification

Title

GPS meteorology: Direct estimation of the absolute value of precipitable water

Abstract

A simple approach to estimating vertically integrated atmospheric water vapor, or precipitable water, from Global Positioning System (GPS) radio signals collected by a regional network of ground-based geodetic GPS receiver is illustrated and validated. Standard space geodetic methods are used to estimate the zenith delay caused by the neutral atmosphere, and surface pressure measurements are used to compute the hydrostatic (or "dry") component of this delay. The zenith hydrostatic delay is subtracted from the zenith neutral delay to determine the zenith wet delay, which is then transformed into an estimate of precipitable water. By incorporating a few remote global tracking stations (and thus long baselines) into the geodetic analysis of a regional GPS network, it is possible to resolve the absolute (not merely the relative) value of the zenith neutral delay at each station in the augmented network. This approach eliminates any need for external comparisons with water vapor radiometer observations and delivers a pure GPS solution for precipitable water. Since the neutral delay is decomposed into its hydrostatic and wet components after the geodetic inversion, the geodetic analysis is not complicated by the fact that some GPS stations are equipped with barometers and some are not. This approach is taken to reduce observations collected in the field experiment GPS/STORM and recover precipitable water with an rms error of 1.0 - 1.5 mm.

Resource type

document

Resource locator

Unique resource identifier

code

https://n2t.org/ark:/85065/d7j967zx

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

1996-06-01T00:00:00Z

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 1996 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