Abstract
The global positioning system (GPS) differential code biases (DCB) provided by the International GNSS Service (IGS) show solar-cycle-like variation during 2002–2013. This study is to examine whether this variation of the GPS DCBs is associated with ionospheric variability. The GPS observations from low earth orbit (LEO) satellites including CHAMP, GRACE and Jason-1 are used to address this issue. The GPS DCBs estimated from the LEO-based observations at different orbit altitudes show a similar tendency as the IGS DCBs. However, this solar-cycle-like dependency is eliminated when the DCBs of 13 continuously operating GPS satellites are constrained to zero-mean. Our results thus revealed that ionospheric variation is not responsible for the long-term variation of the GPS DCBs. Instead, it is attributed to the GPS satellite replacement with different satellite types and the zero-mean condition imposed on all satellite DCBs.
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Acknowledgments
The satellite data were provided by UCAR CDAAC (http://cdaac-www.cosmic.ucar.edu/cdaac/) and NASA (ftp://podaac-ftp.jpl.nasa.gov/). This work was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (41325017, 41274157, 41174139, 41121003 and 41025016), the Project of Chinese Academy of Sciences (KZZD-EW-01), National Key Basic Research Program of China (2012CB825605) and Thousand Young Talents Program of China.
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Zhong, J., Lei, J., Dou, X. et al. Is the long-term variation of the estimated GPS differential code biases associated with ionospheric variability?. GPS Solut 20, 313–319 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10291-015-0437-5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10291-015-0437-5