Precise Positioning Method for Seafloor Geodetic Stations Based on the Temporal Variation of Sound Speed Structure

Abstract

At present, GNSS-Acoustic (GNSS-A) combined technology is widely used in positioning for seafloor geodetic stations. Based on Sound Velocity Profiles (SVPs) data, the equal gradient acoustic ray-tracing method is applied in high-precision position inversion. However, because of the discreteness of the SVPs used in the forementioned method, it ignores the continuous variation of sound velocity structure in time domain, which worsens the positioning accuracy. In this study, the time-domain variation of Sound Speed Structure (SSS) has been considered, and the cubic B-spline function is applied to characterize the perturbed sound velocity. Based on the ray-tracing theory, an inversion model of “stepwise iteration & progressive corrections” for both positioning and sound speed information is proposed, which conducts the gradual correction of seafloor geodetic station coordinates and disturbed sound velocity. The practical data was used to test the effectiveness of our method. The results show that the Root Mean Square (RMS) errors of the residual values of the traditional methods without sound velocity correction, based on quadratic polynomial correction and based on cubic B-spline function correction are 1.43ms, 0.44ms and 0.21ms, respectively. The inversion model with sound velocity correction can effectively eliminate the systematic error caused by the change of SSS, and significantly improve the positioning accuracy of the seafloor geodetic stations.

Keywords

• |gnss-acoustic|sound speed structure|temporal variation|seafloor positioning