New GNSS tomography of the atmosphere method – proposal and testing

Abstract

Paper is focused on GNSS meteorology which is generally used for the determination of water vapour distribution in the atmosphere from GNSS measurements. Water vapour in the atmosphere is an important parameter which influences the state and development of the weather. At first, the paper presents basics of the GNSS meteorology and tomography of the atmosphere and subsequently introduces a new GNSS tomography method which doesn't require an extensive network of GNSS receivers, but uses only a few receivers situated in a line. After a theoretical concept describing this method and used mathematical background, the results from a real experiment are shown and discussed. Unfortunately the results indicate that presented method is not able to provide credible outputs. Possibly the main problem lies in an insufficient number of available signals from current global navigation satellite systems (GPS and GLONASS) where the improvement could be expected after the start of Galileo and Compass. Potential ways how to improve the results without increasing the number of satellites are outlined in the last section.

Keywords

• GNSS tomography, GNSS meteorology, slant wet delay