Estimating horizontal tropospheric gradients in DORIS data processing: Preliminary results

Abstract

Estimating horizontal tropospheric gradients is a common practice in VLBI and GPS data analyses. We investigate here the possibility to do the same for DORIS. We reprocessed all 2007 DORIS data for all satellites, using exactly the same strategy as the latest ignwd08 solution (Willis et al., Adv Space Res 45(12):1470-1480, 2010) but adding two new parameters per day to account for any asymmetry of the tropospheric delays. When averaged over the full year the DORIS north gradient estimates show a significant correlation with GPS estimates at 33 co-located sites. The east gradient is loosely determined with DORIS due to the north-south orientation of the satellites passes in 2007. Typical values are below 1 mm and North component shows a latitude dependency, negative values in the Northern hemisphere and positive values in the Southern hemisphere. The stacking of DORIS station weekly coordinates provides a more realistic value for a factor of unit weight when done using gradient estimation. Station coordinates also indicate a small improvement in internal consistency when compared to a 1-year position and velocity solution without estimating gradients. The DORIS-derived tropospheric gradients may still absorb other types of un-modeled errors, but estimation of such parameters should be investigated in more detail before reprocessing the entire DORIS data set in view of the next ITRF realization, following ITRF2008. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2012.