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On the short-term temporal variations of GNSS receiver differential phase biases

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Abstract

As a first step towards studying the ionosphere with the global navigation satellite system (GNSS), leveling the phase to the code geometry-free observations on an arc-by-arc basis yields the ionospheric observables, interpreted as a combination of slant total electron content along with satellite and receiver differential code biases (DCB). The leveling errors in the ionospheric observables may arise during this procedure, which, according to previous studies by other researchers, are due to the combined effects of the code multipath and the intra-day variability in the receiver DCB. In this paper we further identify the short-term temporal variations of receiver differential phase biases (DPB) as another possible cause of leveling errors. Our investigation starts by the development of a method to epoch-wise estimate between-receiver DPB (BR-DPB) employing (inter-receiver) single-differenced, phase-only GNSS observations collected from a pair of receivers creating a zero or short baseline. The key issue for this method is to get rid of the possible discontinuities in the epoch-wise BR-DPB estimates, occurring when satellite assigned as pivot changes. Our numerical tests, carried out using Global Positioning System (GPS, US GNSS) and BeiDou Navigation Satellite System (BDS, Chinese GNSS) observations sampled every 30 s by a dedicatedly selected set of zero and short baselines, suggest two major findings. First, epoch-wise BR-DPB estimates can exhibit remarkable variability over a rather short period of time (e.g. 6 cm over 3 h), thus significant from a statistical point of view. Second, a dominant factor driving this variability is the changes of ambient temperature, instead of the un-modelled phase multipath.

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Acknowledgements

This work was partially funded by the CAS/KNAW joint research project “Compass, Galileo and GPS for Improved Ionosphere Modelling”, the Positioning Program Project 1.19 “Multi-GNSS PPP-RTK Network Processing” of the Cooperative Research Centre for Spatial Information (CRC-SI), the National key Research Program of China “Collaborative Precision Positioning Project” (No. 2016YFB0501900) and the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Nos. 41604031, 41374043, 41574015). The first author is supported by the CAS Pioneer Hundred Talents Program. The second author is the recipient of an Australian Research Council (ARC) Federation Fellowship (Project Number FF0883188). All this support is gratefully acknowledged.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. State Key Laboratory of Geodesy and Earth’s Dynamics, Institute of Geodesy and Geophysics, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Wuhan, China

    Baocheng Zhang & Yunbin Yuan

  2. Global Navigation Satellite System (GNSS) Research Centre, Curtin University, Perth, Australia

    Peter J. G. Teunissen

  3. Geoscience and Remote Sensing, Delft University of Technology, Delft, The Netherlands

    Peter J. G. Teunissen

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  1. Baocheng Zhang
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  2. Peter J. G. Teunissen
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  3. Yunbin Yuan
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Correspondence to Baocheng Zhang.

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Zhang, B., Teunissen, P.J.G. & Yuan, Y. On the short-term temporal variations of GNSS receiver differential phase biases. J Geod 91, 563–572 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00190-016-0983-9

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00190-016-0983-9

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