Retrieving Accurate Precipitable Water Vapor Based on GNSS Multi‐Antenna PPP With an Ocean‐Based Dynamic Experiment

Abstract

Abstract As an attractive technique for measuring water vapor, the Global Navigation Satellite System (GNSS) faces additional challenges in dynamic applications such as in the open sea. We present a new method of retrieving precipitable water vapor (PWV) based on GNSS multi‐antenna precise point positioning (PPP), which uses GNSS data from multiple antennas and incorporates the constraints of known baseline vector and common tropospheric delay. The 4‐day shipborne dynamic experiment along the China coast demonstrates that the baseline vector constraint shortens the convergence time of positioning and atmospheric parameters, and also slightly improves their accuracies. The common tropospheric delay constraint helps to provide compromised, more robust, and sometimes more accurate PWV estimates. An evaluation with radiosonde‐derived PWVs shows that the combination of the two constraints achieves the best accuracy reaching 4.2 mm. This method helps to expand GNSS meteorology to the vast ocean and benefits satellite altimetry and weather forecasting.

Keywords

• global navigation satellite system
• meteorology
• multi‐antenna PPP
• precipitable water vapor
• ocean‐based dynamic experiment