Calibration of wet tropospheric delays in GPS observation using Raman lidar measurements

Abstract

Water vapor measurements from a Raman lidar developed conjointly by the IGN and the LATMOS/CNRS are used for documenting the water vapor heterogeneities and correcting GPS signal propagation delays in clear sky conditions. We use data from four 6 h-observing sessions during the VAPIC experiment (15 May-15 June 2004). The retrieval of zenith wet delays (ZWDs) from our Raman lidar is shown to agree well with radiosonde (0.6 ± 2.5 mm) and microwave radiometers (-6.6 ± 1.2 and 6.0 ± 3.8 mm) retrievals. ZWDs estimated from GPS data present a good consistency too (-2.0 ± 2.7 mm) but they are still shown to not represent properly the fast evolutions with high frequency variations correlation about 0.12. Part of the errors is also due to multipath and antenna phase center variations. Within this framework, methodologies for integrating of zenith lidar observations into the GPS processing are described. They include also a correction for multipath and antenna phase center variation. The best results are obtained when the lidar ZWDs are used for a priori correcting the GPS phase observations: discrepancies between lidar and GPS estimates are then reduced to -1.1 ± 1.4 mm. It is shown also that mapping function derived from the lidar vertical profiles performs nearly as well as the VMF1 mapping function. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2012.