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An analysis of multisource tropospheric hydrostatic delays and their implications for GPS/GLONASS PPP-based zenith tropospheric delay and height estimations

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Abstract

To obtain better zenith hydrostatic delay (ZHD) corrections for global navigation satellite system (GNSS) applications, seven types of Vienna mapping function 1 (VMF1) and VMF3-like ZHD models provided by the Vienna University of Technology (TU Wien, TUW), University of New Brunswick (UNB) and GeoForschungsZentrum Potsdam (GFZ) are evaluated. Firstly, we find that the conventional method for implementing VMF1/VMF3-like ZHD models has issues when applied over regions with highly variable topography. Therefore, we propose an improved implementation method (called Trop_vertical) based on an empirical model as well as a second version, called Trop_vertical-II, which further corrects for small residual biases. The results show that the Trop_vertical-II can effectively reduce the large errors reported in previous studies for complex terrains and yields an improvement in global accuracy of up to 50% over the conventional method. Then, the multisource ZHD models are evaluated and intercompared globally. The results reveal some deficiencies with the TUW-VMF1 over certain regions. The newly developed ZHD models from the TUW (TUW-VMF3) and GFZ (GFZ-VMF3) both achieve reliable performances globally, but there is a systematic difference (~ 2.9 mm) between them. The forecast VMF1/VMF3-like models can well capture the rapid ZHD variation in challenging weather conditions. Finally, the impacts of a priori ZHD errors on both GPS-only and GPS/GLONASS precise point positioning (PPP)-based zenith total delay (ZTD) and height solutions are examined globally. The results suggest that the sensitivities of PPP-ZTD/height solutions to a priori ZHD errors decrease by adding GLONASS data at high latitudes but increase at low latitudes.

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Data availability

GNSS and in situ pressure data are provided by the International GNSS Service (IGS) and the Polar Earth Observing Network (POLENET), which can be accessed from ftp://cddis.gsfc.nasa.gov/ and ftp://data-out.unavco.org/. The legacy VMF1/VMF3 models are available at http://vmf.geo.tuwien.ac.at/. The GFZ-VMF1/VMF3 models are available at ftp.gfz-potsdam.de/GNSS/products/gfz-vmf1/. The UNB-VMF1 model is available at http://unb-vmf1.gge.unb.ca/. The ERA5 data were obtained from Copernicus Climate Data Store.

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Acknowledgements

This work was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (No. 41904041), China Postdoctoral Science Foundation (No. 2019M660192), National Key Research Program (No. 2016YFB0501900) and National Natural Science Foundation of China (42074037). We acknowledge the IGS, CODE, ECMWF, POLENET, TUW, GFZ and UNB for supplying the research datasets. We are indebted to J. Boehm of TUW, F. Zus of GFZ and T. Nikolaidou of UNB for their useful discussions. We would like to thank two anonymous reviewers for their valuable comments on the manuscript.

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  1. State Key Laboratory of Geodesy and Earth’s Dynamics, Innovation Academy for Precision Measurement Science and Technology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Wuhan, China

    Hongxing Zhang, Yunbin Yuan & Wei Li

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  1. Hongxing Zhang
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  2. Yunbin Yuan
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  3. Wei Li
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Contributions

HXZ and YBY designed the research and processed data; YBY supervised the research; WL revised the manuscript and helped with the writing; HXZ, YBY and WL analysed the data; HXZ wrote the paper. All authors discussed and commented on the manuscript.

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Correspondence to Hongxing Zhang.

Appendix 1

Appendix 1

See Table 4.

Table 4 Grid points of the TUW-VMF1-(FC) models with ZHD bias exceeding 10 mm
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Zhang, H., Yuan, Y. & Li, W. An analysis of multisource tropospheric hydrostatic delays and their implications for GPS/GLONASS PPP-based zenith tropospheric delay and height estimations. J Geod 95, 83 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00190-021-01535-3

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