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GPS/INS navigation precision and its effect on airborne radio occultation retrieval accuracy

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Abstract

An airborne radio occultation (RO) system has been developed to retrieve atmospheric profiles of refractivity, moisture, and temperature. The long-term objective of such a system is deployment on commercial aircraft to increase the quantity of moisture observations in flight corridors in order to improve weather forecast accuracy. However, there are several factors important to operational feasibility that have an impact on the accuracy of the airborne RO results. We investigate the effects of different types of navigation system noise on the precision of the retrieved atmospheric profiles using recordings from the GNSS Instrument System for Multistatic and Occultation Sensing (GISMOS) test flights, which used an Applanix POS/AV 510 Global Positioning System (GPS)/Inertial Navigation System (INS). The data were processed using a carrier phase differential GPS technique, and then the GPS position and inertial measurement unit data were combined in a loosely coupled integrated inertial navigation solution. This study quantifies the velocity precision as a function of distance from GPS reference network sites, the velocity precision with or without an inertial measurement unit, the impact of the quality of the inertial measurement unit, and the compromise in precision resulting from the use of real-time autonomous GPS positioning. We find that using reference stations with baseline lengths of up to 760 km from the survey area has a negligible impact on the retrieved refractivity precision. We also find that only a small bias (less than 0.5% in refractivity) results from the use of an autonomous GPS solution rather than a post-processed differential solution when used in an integrated GPS/INS system. This greatly expands the potential range of an operational airborne radio occultation system, particularly over the oceans, where observations are sparse.

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Acknowledgments

This work was supported by the National Science Foundation (NSF) through the HIAPER University Corporation for Atmospheric Research (UCAR) Subcontract S05-39696. We would like to acknowledge Jay Fein and James Huning at NSF for their support through grant SGER-0802887. We thank Tyler Lulich for his assistance in collecting the campaign data. High-rate GPS data were provided by Roy Dokka and Anthony Cavell at the Louisiana State University Center for Geoinformatics. GPS data and orbits were provided by the NOAA CORS network and the International GNSS Service. We thank Stig Syndergaard at DMI and the UCAR COSMIC office for assistance with the simulation methods. We thank the UCAR EOL Facilities Office for supporting the observation campaign, and in particular the technical expertise and hard work of the HIAPER crew at the UCAR Research Aviation Facility. We acknowledge the infrastructure and expertise provided by Eric Calais of Purdue University. We also thank the reviewers for very insightful and detailed comments.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences, Purdue University, 550 Stadium Mall Dr., West Lafayette, IN, 47907-2051, USA

    Paytsar Muradyan & Jennifer S. Haase

  2. JIFRESSE, University of California, Los Angeles, CA, 90095, USA

    Feiqin Xie

  3. Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics Engineering, Purdue University, West Lafayette, IN, 47907, USA

    James L. Garrison & Justin Voo

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  1. Paytsar Muradyan
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  2. Jennifer S. Haase
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  3. Feiqin Xie
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  4. James L. Garrison
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  5. Justin Voo
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Correspondence to Paytsar Muradyan.

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Muradyan, P., Haase, J.S., Xie, F. et al. GPS/INS navigation precision and its effect on airborne radio occultation retrieval accuracy. GPS Solut 15, 207–218 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10291-010-0183-7

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10291-010-0183-7

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