A global grid model for the correction of the vertical zenith total delay based on a sliding window algorithm

Abstract

Reanalysis products have been applied to calculate the tropospheric delay for Global Navigation Satellite System (GNSS) positioning purposes widely. It is necessary to obtain high-precision tropospheric delay information from GNSS users with a high-precision tropospheric vertical stratification model because the height of the grids of the atmospheric reanalysis data is inconsistent with that of GNSS users, especially in regions with high terrains. In addition, the variation of the tropospheric delay in the vertical direction is much higher than that in the horizontal direction. The zenith total delay (ZTD) vertical stratification model is also key to the development of real-time and high-precision ZTD models. A new approach, the sliding window algorithm, is proposed to develop a ZTD vertical stratification model. In this work, a ZTD vertical stratification model considering spatiotemporal factors is developed based on the second Modern-Era Retrospective analysis for Research and Applications (MERRA-2) data, which is named the GZTD-H model. Radiosonde and International GNSS Service (IGS) data are treated as reference values to evaluate the performance of the GZTD-H model, which is compared to the model GPT2w. The results show that the GZTD-H model realizes the highest performance in ZTD layered vertical interpolation against ZTD layered profiles obtained at radiosonde sites, which achieves an improvement of 10% over the model GPT2w. Compared to model GPT2w, the GZTD-H model attains a spatial interpolation improvement of 8% for the Global Geodetic Observing System (GGOS) Atmosphere gridded ZTD over the surface ZTD calculated from radiosonde profiles. Furthermore, compared to model GPT2w, the model GZTD-H also attains improvements of 11% over the precise ZTD products acquired at IGS sites. In terms of model parameters, the GZTD-H model is greatly reduced and optimized over model GPT2w. Hence, the applicability of this model is enhanced in terms of GNSS atmospheric sounding and precise GNSS positioning.