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A case study of using Raman lidar measurements in high-accuracy GPS applications

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Abstract

This paper investigates the impact of rapid small-scale water vapor fluctuations on GPS height determination. Water vapor measurements from a Raman lidar are used for documenting the water vapor heterogeneities and correcting GPS signal propagation delays in clear sky conditions. We use data from four short observing sessions (6 h) during the VAPIC experiment (15 May–15 June 2004). The retrieval of wet delays from our Raman lidar is shown to agree well with radiosonde retrievals (bias and standard deviation (SD) were smaller than 1 and 2.8 mm, respectively) and microwave radiometers (from two different instruments, bias was 6.0/−6.6 mm and SD 1.3/3.8 mm). A standard GPS data analysis is shown to fail in accurately reproducing fast zenith wet delay (ZWD) variations. The ZWD estimates could be improved when mean post-fit phase residuals were removed. Several methodologies for integrating zenith lidar observations into the GPS data processing are also presented. The final method consists in using lidar wet delays for correcting a priori the GPS phase observations and estimating a scale factor for the lidar wet delays jointly with the GPS station position. The estimation of this scale factor allows correcting for a mis-calibration in the lidar data and provides in the same way an estimate of the Raman lidar instrument constant. The agreement of this constant with an independent determination using radiosonde data is at the level of 1–4%. The lidar wet delays were derived by ray-tracing from zenith pointing measurements: further improvement in GPS positioning is expected from slant path lidar measurements that would properly account for water vapor anisotropy.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Laboratoire d’Opto-électronique et de Micro-Informatique, Institut Géographique National, Saint-Mandé, France

    Pierre Bosser & Christian Thom

  2. Laboratoire de Recherche en Géodésie, Institut Géographique National, Marne-La-Vallée, France

    Olivier Bock

  3. Laboratoire Atmosphères, Milieux, Observations Spatiales, Institut Pierre Simon Laplace, Paris, France

    Jacques Pelon

  4. Direction Technique, Institut Géographique National, Saint-Mandé, France

    Pascal Willis

  5. Géophysique Spatiale et Planétaire, Institut de Physique du Globe de Paris, UFR STEP, Paris, France

    Pascal Willis

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  1. Pierre Bosser
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  2. Olivier Bock
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  3. Christian Thom
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  4. Jacques Pelon
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  5. Pascal Willis
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Correspondence to Pierre Bosser.

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Bosser, P., Bock, O., Thom, C. et al. A case study of using Raman lidar measurements in high-accuracy GPS applications. J Geod 84, 251–265 (2010). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00190-009-0362-x

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