Tomographic Reconstruction of Atmospheric Water Vapor Profiles Using Multi-GNSS Observations

Abstract

Continuously operating reference stations (CORS) provide augmentation services for the highly accurate, cm-level GNSS positioning needs of land surveyors, agriculture, and even autonomous vehicles. These stations have accurate coordinates, thus they can be used to estimate the signal delay caused by the neutral atmosphere including the atmospheric water vapor. The estimated zenith wet delay (ZWD) is in a close correlation with the integrated water vapor in the atmospheric column. Since a ground station tracks several satellites at every epoch, one could also estimate the slant tropospheric delays, which can provide information on the spatial distribution of the atmospheric water vapor, too. This paper introduces a near real-time multi-GNSS processing approach to estimate slant wet tropospheric delays and a coupled tomographic reconstruction technique to estimate the 3D wet refractivity model that can be assimilated in numerical weather models. The estimated zenith tropospheric delays (ZTDs) and tropospheric gradients are used to restore the slant wet delays (SWD) affecting the observed satellite-receiver range. The SWDs are used as input for a tomographic reconstruction algorithm providing the wet refractivities in a pre-defined voxel model. The derived refractivity profiles have been validated with radiosonde observations. The results show that our GNSS tomography approach could reconstruct the refractivities with the uncertainty of 10 ppm below 3 km of altitude and of 0.3 ppm at the altitude of 10 km in terms of standard deviation.