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Atmospheric modeling for co-located VLBI antennas and twin telescopes

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Abstract

In the next generation VLBI network, the VLBI global observing system (VGOS), there will be several twin telescopes, i.e. stations equipped with a pair of VLBI telescopes with identical design. In this work we test the possibility of combining the tropospheric parameters of these two telescopes within the VLBI data analysis. This is done through simulations of a possible future VGOS network containing one twin telescope. We simulate the tropospheric delays with the help of a turbulence model, approximately taking into account the distance between the antennas. The results show that the combination of tropospheric delays can improve the station position repeatability by about 15 % as long as the distance is smaller than 1 km. The main improvement is in the repeatability of the baseline vector between the antennas. However, the results are strongly dependent on how the observations are scheduled for the twin telescope. The simulation results are confirmed by an analysis of the CONT14 campaign, where the tropospheric parameters of the two Hobart antennas are combined. Furthermore, we also discuss the study of combining other parameters for the twin telescope, i.e. the clocks and/or the station positions.

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Acknowledgments

We are grateful to all the people and institutes involved in the CONT14 campaign: the VLBI stations for doing the observations, the people at the correlator at MPIfR in Bonn for doing the correlation, the VLBI group at GSFC for producing the version 4 VLBI databases, and the IVS (International VLBI Service for Geodesy and Astrometry, Schuh and Behrend 2012) for coordinating everything and providing the VLBI data. We would also like to thank the three anonymous reviewers for their valuable comments on the manuscript.

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  1. Department 1: Geodesy and Remote Sensing, Helmholtz Centre Potsdam, GFZ German Research Centre for Geosciences, 14473, Potsdam, Germany

    Tobias Nilsson, Maria Karbon, Benedikt Soja, Robert Heinkelmann, Cuixian Lu & Harald Schuh

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  1. Tobias Nilsson
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  2. Maria Karbon
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  3. Benedikt Soja
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  4. Robert Heinkelmann
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  5. Cuixian Lu
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  6. Harald Schuh
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Correspondence to Tobias Nilsson.

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Nilsson, T., Karbon, M., Soja, B. et al. Atmospheric modeling for co-located VLBI antennas and twin telescopes. J Geod 89, 655–665 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00190-015-0804-6

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