An optimal tropospheric tomography method based on the multi-GNSS observations

Abstract

Aside from the well-known applications (positioning, navigation and timing) brought by Global Navigation Satellite System (GNSS), reconstruction of tropospheric atmosphere distribution information using tomography technique based on the multi-GNSS observations has been developed as a research point in the fields of GNSS Meteorology. In this paper, an optimal tropospheric tomography method using observations from multi-GNSS (Global Navigation Satellite System) is proposed, which considers the reasonable weightings of observation equations derived from multi-GNSS as well as the various constraints. Comparing to the equal weighting strategy of multi-GNSS observations for the previously multi-GNSS tomography studies, the proposed method in this paper has the ability to tune the weightings for a different type of equations. Experiments show that the proposed method can improve the internal/external accuracy of GNSS tomography modeling with the GNSS precise point positioning (PPP)-estimated slant wet delay as reference when compared to the conventional method. In addition, the data derived from radiosonde is used as an external testing, and the result also expresses the superiority of the proposed method when compared to the conventional method.