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Effect of the polar cap ionospheric sporadic-E layer on GNSS-based positioning: a case study at Resolute Bay, Canada, September 5, 2012

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Abstract

We focus on the impacts of the polar cap ionospheric sporadic-E (Es) layer that occurred at Resolute Bay, Canada, on September 5, 2012, on the quality of the Global Positioning System (GPS) observable and the positioning performance. Mainly, we are concerned about the relationship between the thin Es layer and the ionosphere scintillation and the reason behind the degraded positioning performance during the event of the polar cap Es. The results show that the polar cap Es can trigger weak-to-moderate amplitude scintillation and the maximum positioning errors in the up component for the Ionospheric-Free Precise Point Positioning (IF-PPP) model can reach up to 0.51 m while that for the Uncombined PPP (UC-PPP) model can reach 1.20 m. The maximum positioning errors occur simultaneously with the time of the maximum amplitude scintillation induced by the polar cap Es. The degraded positioning performance can be attributed mostly to falsely detected cycle slips (CSs), which are influenced by the polar cap Es layer-induced scintillation. To mitigate this, we propose the 3-sigma rule to determine the threshold of the CS detection observables. The preliminary results show that compared with the commonly adopted threshold values, the positioning accuracy improvement in the up component is 14.1% for the IF-PPP model while the corresponding improvement is 40.8% for the UC-PPP model, suggesting that the high accuracy positioning performance can be achieved in the high latitude region by statistic characterization of the CS thresholds.

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Data availability

The GPS and ionosonde data are provided by CHAIN at http://chain.physics.unb.ca/; the space weather environment data are from Goddard Space Flight Center Space Physics Data Facility OMNIWeb at https://omniweb.gsfc.nasa.gov/.

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Acknowledgements

The study is funded by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (No.42004012, 42004025), Natural Science Foundation of Shandong Province, China(No.ZR2020QD048), State Key Laboratory of Geo-Information Engineering (No.SKLGIE2019-Z-2-2), State Key Laboratory of Geodesy and Earth Dynamics (No. SKLGED-2021-3-4) and by the project RTI2018-094295-B-I00 funded by the MCIN/AEI 10.13039/501100011033 which is co-founded by the FEDER program. We acknowledge the usage of the GAMP package for the positioning performances at https://www.ngs.noaa.gov/gps-toolbox/. We thank the anonymous reviewers for the comments and suggestions, which significantly improve the quality of the manuscript.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. State Key Laboratory of Geo-Information Engineering, Xi’an, China

    Wenfeng Nie

  2. Institute of Space Sciences, Shandong University, Weihai, China

    Wenfeng Nie, Yong Wang & Tianhe Xu

  3. Research Group of Astronomy and Geomatics (gAGE), Universitat Politecnica de Catalunya (UPC), Barcelona, Spain

    Adria Rovira-Garcia

  4. National-Local Joint Engineering Laboratory of Geo‑Spatial Information Technology, Hunan University of Science and Technology, Xiangtan, China

    Dunyong Zheng

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  1. Wenfeng Nie
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Correspondence to Tianhe Xu.

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Nie, W., Wang, Y., Rovira-Garcia, A. et al. Effect of the polar cap ionospheric sporadic-E layer on GNSS-based positioning: a case study at Resolute Bay, Canada, September 5, 2012. GPS Solut 26, 60 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10291-022-01246-y

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