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Ionosphere-weighted post-processing kinematic for airborne positioning with refined modeling of receiver phase biases and tropospheric zenith wet delays

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Abstract

The application of the global navigation satellite system (GNSS) in aviation effectively meets the requirements of aircraft location-based services. However, the GNSS application in airborne surveys mostly follows the land survey method, which ignores the particularity of the airborne flight operations, such as the rapid change of altitude difference. The present study contributes to this research trend by constructing a suitable positioning model for airborne kinematic precise positioning and analyzing the variation characteristics of receiver phase biases (RPBs) and tropospheric zenith wet delays (ZWDs) to explore their impact on airborne positioning. The ionosphere-weighted post-processing kinematic (PPK) model for long-distance high-altitude positioning is constructed by adding the between-station single-differenced ionospheric pseudo-observations. Aside from these, the correlation between the characteristics of RPBs, ZWDs, and environmental factors (temperature, vapor pressure) is analyzed and the kinematic constraint of the ionosphere-weighted PPK model on RPBs and ZWDs is adjusted based on their true variations. The results show that under the condition of large altitude differences, temperature-sensitive RPBs and ZWDs significantly impact positioning. Furthermore, pre-calibrating RPBs and ZWDs can significantly improve the ambiguity success rate and positioning performance. Based on the bias-calibrated ionosphere-weighted PPK model, the fixed solutions difference of the two common-antenna moving stations carried by the manned aircraft is stable for the positioning results of the two flight experiments. The 3-dimensional root-mean-square (3D-RMS) values are 1.4 cm and 0.5 cm, with 82% and 99% ambiguity success ratios.

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Data availability

The observation data of this study are available from the authors for academic purposes on reasonable request.

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Acknowledgements

This work was partially funded by China's National Natural Science Foundation (Grant No. 42022025). The support of Hong Kong Research Grants Council (RGC) (Project B-Q80Q PolyU 15221620) is appreciated. The corresponding author is supported by the CAS Pioneer Hundred Talents Program.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Innovation Academy for Precision Measurement Science and Technology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Wuhan, China

    Rui Gao & Baocheng Zhang

  2. College of Earth and Planetary Sciences, University of Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, China

    Rui Gao

  3. Department of Land Surveying and Geo‑Informatics, The Hong Kong Polytechnic University, 11 Yuk Choi Road, Kowloon, Hong Kong

    Zhizhao Liu

  4. (German) International Science and Technology Cooperative Offshore Center for Geodesy Frontier Technology, Wuhan, China

    Baocheng Zhang

  5. State Key Laboratory of Satellite Navigation System and Equipment Technology, The 54th Research Institute of China Electronics Technology Group Corporation, Shijiazhuang, China

    Baocheng Zhang

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  1. Rui Gao
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Correspondence to Baocheng Zhang.

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Gao, R., Liu, Z. & Zhang, B. Ionosphere-weighted post-processing kinematic for airborne positioning with refined modeling of receiver phase biases and tropospheric zenith wet delays. GPS Solut 26, 113 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10291-022-01299-z

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