Identification

Title

Atmospheric water vapor and geoid measurements in the open ocean with GPS

Abstract

We have conducted two experiments to determine precipitable water vapor (PWV) and sea surface heights from a cruising ship in the open ocean. During the first experiment (July 7-13, 02) GPS and radiosonde PWV agreed at the 2 mm rms level. During the second experiment (Aug 23-30, 03) GPS compared at 1.5 mm rms (1.1 mm GPS high bias) with eight ship-launched radiosondes and at 2.8 mm rms (1.2 mm GPS high bias) to a ship-based water vapor radiometer (WVR). We estimate that the vertical position of the GPS antenna in the open ocean was determined to better than 10 cm rms. After correcting for ocean tides GPS estimated sea surface heights from the second cruise compared to the CARIB97 geoid at the 32 cm level in the vertical. Because space based observations of PWV over the oceans generally require cloudless conditions and are accurate to about 5-10% we conclude that ship based GPS observations can provide additional useful meteorological information. Based on the 10-cm vertical position rms and the high horizontal resolution of ship-based positions we further conclude that useful geodetic information can be obtained from high accuracy GPS observations from ships in the open oceans.

Resource type

document

Resource locator

Unique resource identifier

code

http://n2t.net/ark:/85065/d7z320z5

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

2005-06-24T00:00:00Z

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

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