Abstract
Three-dimensional water vapor can be reconstructed from Global Navigation Satellite System (GNSS) observations, which can study 3-D profile variations of atmospheric water vapor and climate. However, there is a large uncertainty of water vapor tomography from single GPS system observations due to limited satellites. The rapid development of multi-GNSS, including China’s Beidou Navigation Satellite System (BDS) and Russia’s GLONASS, has greatly improved the geometric distribution of satellite ray-path signals, which may improve the performance of water vapor tomography by combining multi-GNSS. In this paper, 3-D water vapor tomography results are the first time obtained using multi-GNSS data from Continuously Operating Reference Stations (CORS) network in Wuhan, China, whose performances are validated by radiosonde and the latest ECMWF ERA5 reanalysis products. The results show that the integrated multi-GNSS can pronouncedly increase the number of effective signals, and 3-D water vapor results are better than those from the GPS-only system, improving by 5% with GPS + GLONASS or GPS + GLONASS + BDS, while BDS has results that are not improved too much. Therefore, multi-GNSS will enhance the reliability and accuracy of 3-D water vapor tomography, which has more potential applications in the future.
Highlights
The distribution and variations of atmospheric water vapor are related to various weathers and climate changes and, water vapor has always been an extremely important observation in these fields
By comparing different Global Navigation Satellite Systems (GNSS) tropospheric tomography results, it can be found that the integrated multi-GNSS systems can significantly increase the number of tomography signals, improve the spatial distribution of inversion signals in tomographic grid, as well as obtain more stable inversed solutions than standalone systems, and multi-GNSS system results are better than standalone ones, which will benefit in the research of weather and climate change
The multi-GNSS observations provided by the Continuously Operating Reference Stations (CORS) network in Wuhan, China are used to reconstruct 3-D water vapor, and the tomographic results are validated by radiosonde data and the latest ERA5 reanalysis products
Summary
The distribution and variations of atmospheric water vapor are related to various weathers and climate changes and, water vapor has always been an extremely important observation in these fields. The spatial distribution of 3-D or 4-D water vapor can be obtained by tomographic techniques through the dense ground-based GPS station network, which will benefit numeric weather prediction together with assimilation methods, the study of water vapor transport during precipitation, and even the nowcasting of extreme disastrous weather. It has a large uncertainty of water vapor tomography from single-system GPS observations due to limited satellites. Combining with other water vapor observation technologies, including radiosondes, water vapor radiometers, sun photometers, and even
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