Impact of Tropospheric Delay Gradients on Total Tropospheric Delay and Precise Point Positioning

GPS signals are electromagnetic waves that are affected by the Earth’s atmosphere. The Earth’s atmosphere can be categorized, according to its effect on GPS signals, into the ionosphere (ionospheric delay) and neutral atmosphere (tropospheric delay). The first-order ionospheric delay can be eliminated by linear combination of GPS observables on different frequencies. However, tropospheric delay cannot be eliminated because it is frequency-independent. The total tropospheric delay can be divided into three components. The first is the dry component, the second part is the wet component, and the third part is the horizontal gradients which account for the azimuthal dependence of tropospheric delay. In this paper, the effect of modeling tropospheric gradients on the estimation of the total tropospheric delay and station position is investigated. Long session, one month during January 2015, of GPS data is collected from ten randomly selected globally distributed IGS stations. Two cases are studied: the first case, the coordinates of stations are kept fixed to their actual values and the tropospheric delay is estimated twice, with and without tropospheric gradients. In the second case, the station position is estimated along with the total tropospheric delay with and without tropospheric gradients. It is shown that the average bias of the estimated total tropospheric delay when neglecting tropospheric gradients ranges from ?1.72 mm to 2.14 mm while the average bias when estimating gradients are ?0.898 mm to 1.92 mm which means that the bias is reduced by about 30%. In addition, the average standard deviation of the bias is 4.26 mm compared with 4.52 mm which means that the standard deviation is improved by about 6%.

Precise Point Positioning Technique with IGS Real-Time Service (RTS) for Maritime Applications

The maritime navigation accuracy requirements for radionavigation systems such as GPS are specified by the International Maritime Organization (IMO). Maritime navigation usually consists of three major phases identified as Ocean/Coastal/Port approach/Inland waterway, in port navigation and automatic docking with an accuracy requirement that ranges from 10 m to 0.1 m. With the advancement in autonomous GPS positioning techniques such as Precise Point Positioning (PPP) and with the advent of the new IGS-Real-Time-Service (RTS), it is necessary to assess the possibility of a wider role of the PPP-based positioning technique in maritime applications. This paper investigates the performance of an autonomous real-time PPP-positioning solution by using the IGS- RTS service for maritime applications that require an accurate positioning system. To examine the performance of the real-time IGS-RTS PPP-based technique for maritime applications, kinematic data from a dual frequency GPS receiver is investigated. It is shown that the real-time IGS-RTS PPP-based GPS positioning technique fulfills IMO requirements for maritime applications with an accuracy requirement ranges from 10 m for Ocean/Coastal/Port approach/Inland waterways navigation to 1.0 m for in port navigation but cannot fulfill the automatic docking application with an accuracy requirement of 0.10 m. To further investigate the real-time PPP-based GPS positioning technique, a comparison is made between the real-time IGS-RTS PPP-based positioning technique and the real-time PPP-based positioning by using the predicted part of the IGS Ultra-Rapid products and the real-time GPS positioning technique with the Wide Area Differential GPS service (WADGPS). It is shown that the IGS-RTS PPP-based positioning technique is superior to the IGS-Ultra-Rapid PPP-based and WADGPS-based positioning techniques.