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Calibration of regional ionospheric delay with uncombined precise point positioning and accuracy assessment

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A new method for the calibration of regional ionospheric delay based on uncombined precise point positioning (U-PPP) is proposed in this study. The performance of the new method was comparatively validated in terms of its accuracy and robustness with respect to the phase-smoothed pseudorange (PSP) method through two short-baseline experiments. Accuracy of the PPP-derived ionospheric delays was further assessed by interpolating them to a user station to perform single-frequency simulated kinematic PPP. Two 24-hr period datasets of four continuous operation reference system (CORS) stations were analyzed, collected during calm and disturbed ionospheric conditions, respectively. The single-frequency GPS observables from a user station, that were a-priori corrected by the interpolated ionospheric delays, were utilized to implement single-frequency PPP (SF-PPP). The results show that interpolation accuracy is better than 1 dm and, with the proposed method, is less affected by the ionospheric activity; meanwhile, positioning accuracy of SF-PPP was 4~5 cm (horizontal) and better than 1 dm (vertical). For comparison, two reference SF-PPP solutions were also obtained, in which the ionospheric delays are eliminated either by forming semi-combination observations or by using global ionosphere maps (GIM) model values; in both cases the positioning accuracy was only 4~7 dm (horizontal) and 1 m (vertical). These results provide a further demonstration of the performance of PPP-based regional ionospheric calibration in the parameter domain.

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Acknowledgements

This work was jointly supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant Nos. 40874012, 40974008), National Key Program 863 (Grant No. 2011AA120503), National Key Technology R&D Program (Grant No. 2012BAB16B01), and the Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities (Grant No. 201121402020009) for financial support.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Geodesy and Geomatics, Wuhan University, Wuhan, 430 079, China

    LI WEI & WANG HUA

  2. Chinese Academic of Surveying and Mapping, Beijing, 100 830, China

    LI WEI, CHENG PENGFEI, BEI JINZHONG, WEN HANJIANG & WANG HUA

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  1. LI WEI
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  2. CHENG PENGFEI
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Correspondence to LI WEI.

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WEI, L., PENGFEI, C., JINZHONG, B. et al. Calibration of regional ionospheric delay with uncombined precise point positioning and accuracy assessment. J Earth Syst Sci 121, 989–999 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12040-012-0206-6

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