Abstract
A near real-time troposphere tomography system (WATS-NRT) based on Global Positioning System (GPS) slant wet delays (SWD) was developed to reconstruct three-dimensional wet refractivity fields over a wide area. The NCEP Global Forecast System (GFS) short-range forecast products (GFS-FC) were taken as the tomography background to tackle the ill-condition issue, and the Adaptive Simultaneous Iterative Reconstruction Technique (ASIRT) was used for parameter estimation to avoid an inversion of a large sparse matrix. Experiments were set up for a 7-day period covering a severe storm event to evaluate the performance of the tomography system over an area with about 5000 tomographic nodes. Statistics of the computation time illustrate that WATS-NRT is efficient enough for providing 30 min interval tomography products in the studied area. Wet refractivity time series from the tomography product experience dramatic rises before the advent of heavy rain, which is not presented in the GFS-FC products. Comparisons also show general better agreements with the nearby radiosonde profiles in tomography products than GFS-FC, especially at the lower troposphere. In addition, average error RMS of SWD derived from tomography products is about 38 mm at an elevation of 15° and 9 mm in the zenith direction, compared to more than 70 and 16 mm for SWD from both GFS-FC and the reanalysis product ERA5, and compared to about 44 and 9 mm for ZWDINT method. These results suggest that WATS-NRT can be promising in some applications, such as monitoring extreme weather events, providing tropospheric delay estimates in geodetic data analysis and developing new mapping functions.
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Data availability
GPS data used in this study can be applied from Guangdong Institute of Land Resources Surveying and Mapping. Rain gauge data can be accessed at: https://data.cma.cn/. The radiosonde data can be downloaded from: https://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/data-access/weather-balloon/integrated-global-radiosonde-archive. The ERA5 products can be accessed at: https://climate.copernicus.eu/climate-reanalysis. The GFS products can be accessed at: https://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/data-access/model-data/model-datasets/global-forcast-system-gfs.
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Acknowledgements
This work was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (41774036; 41804023; 41961144015), the Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities (2042020kf0020), the Open Research Fund of State Key Laboratory of Information Engineering in Surveying, Mapping and Remote Sensing, Wuhan University (17P01), and the National Key Research and Development Program of China (2017YFB0503401). The authors would like to thank Guangdong Institute of Land Resources Surveying and Mapping for providing GPS data, CMA for providing rain gauge data, IGRA for providing radiosonde data, NOAA CISL for providing forecast products and ECMWF for providing ERA5 products.
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YL and WZ designed the research; JH and WL developed the software; WZ and WL performed the research. ZW, YZ, and HZ analyzed the data; and WZ wrote the paper.
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Zhang, W., Lou, Y., Liu, W. et al. Rapid troposphere tomography using adaptive simultaneous iterative reconstruction technique. J Geod 94, 76 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00190-020-01386-4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00190-020-01386-4