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Troposphere delays from space geodetic techniques, water vapor radiometers, and numerical weather models over a series of continuous VLBI campaigns

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Abstract

Continuous, very long baseline interferometry (VLBI) campaigns over 2 weeks have been carried out repeatedly, i.e., CONT02 in October 2002, CONT05 in September 2005, CONT08 in August 2008, and CONT11 in September 2011, to demonstrate the highest accuracy the current VLBI was capable at that time. In this study, we have compared zenith total delays (ZTD) and troposphere gradients as consistently estimated from the observations of VLBI, Global Navigation Satellite Systems (GNSS), and Doppler Orbitography and Radiopositioning Integrated by Satellite (DORIS) at VLBI sites participating in the CONT campaigns. We analyzed the CONT campaigns using the state-of-the-art software following common processing strategies as closely as possible. In parallel, ZTD and gradients were derived from numerical weather models, i.e., from the global European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts (ECMWF) analysis fields, the High Resolution Limited Area Model (European sites), the Japan Meteorological Agency-Operational Meso-Analysis Field (MANAL, over Japan), and the Cloud Resolving Storm Simulator (Tsukuba, Japan). Finally, zenith wet delays were estimated from the observations of water vapor radiometers (WVR) at sites where the WVR observables are available during the CONT sessions. The best ZTD agreement, interpreted as the smallest standard deviation, was found between GNSS and VLBI techniques to be about 5–6 mm at most of the co-located sites and CONT campaigns. We did not detect any significant improvement in the ZTD agreement between various techniques over time, except for DORIS and MANAL. On the other hand, the agreement and thus the accuracy of the troposphere parameters mainly depend on the amount of humidity in the atmosphere.

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Acknowledgments

This work is supported by the Austrian Science Fund (FWF) project, P20902-N10 (GGOS Atmosphere). Kamil Teke acknowledges Scientific and Technological Research Council of Turkey (Tübitak) for the financial support of the postdoctoral research programme, 2219. The work of DORIS was supported by the Centre National d’Etudes Spatiales (CNES) and based on observations with DORIS embarked on SPOTs, TOPEX/Poseidon, Envisat, Jason-2 and Cryosat-2 satellites. This paper is IPGP-3403 contribution. We used in this study the data provided by the International VLBI Service for Geodesy and Astrometry (IVS, Schuh and Behrend 2012), the International GNSS Service (IGS, Dow et al. 2009), the International DORIS Service (IDS, Willis et al. 2010a), the Centre for Orbit Determination in Europe (CODE, Dach et al. 2009), the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecast (ECMWF, Dee et al. 2011), the Japan Meteorological Agency (JMA, Saito et al. 2006), and the authors would like to thank all components of the aforementioned services. The authors want to acknowledge SMHI and AEMet for providing HIRLAM (Undén et al. 2002) data for different grid spacings for all CONT sessions.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Geomatics Engineering, Hacettepe University, Ankara, Turkey

    Kamil Teke

  2. Department of Geodesy and Geoinformation, Vienna University of Technology, Vienna, Austria

    Kamil Teke & Johannes Böhm

  3. Section 1.1, GPS/Galileo Earth Observations, GFZ German Research Centre for Geosciences, Potsdam, Germany

    Tobias Nilsson

  4. Space-Time Standards Group, National Institute of Information and Communications Technology (NICT), 4-2-1 Nukui-Kitamachi, Koganei, Tokyo, 184-8795, Japan

    Thomas Hobiger

  5. Institut für Astronomische und Physikalische Geodäsie, Technische Universität München, Arcisstraße 21, 80333 , Munich, Germany

    Peter Steigenberger

  6. Department of Earth and Space Sciences, Chalmers University of Technology, Onsala Space Observatory, 43992 , Onsala, Sweden

    Susana García-Espada & Rüdiger Haas

  7. Instituto Geografico Nacional, Apartado 148, 19080 , Yebes, Spain

    Susana García-Espada

  8. Institut national de l’information géographique et forestière, Direction Technique, 73 avenue de Paris, Saint-Mandé, 94165, France

    Pascal Willis

  9. Institut de Physique du Globe de Paris, Univ Paris Diderot, Sorbonne Paris Cité, UMR 7154 CNRS, 75013 , Paris, France

    Pascal Willis

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  1. Kamil Teke
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Teke, K., Nilsson, T., Böhm, J. et al. Troposphere delays from space geodetic techniques, water vapor radiometers, and numerical weather models over a series of continuous VLBI campaigns. J Geod 87, 981–1001 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00190-013-0662-z

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