A New Approach for the Development of Grid Models Calculating Tropospheric Key Parameters over China

Abstract

Pressure, water vapor pressure, temperature, and weighted mean temperature (Tm) are tropospheric parameters that play an important role in high-precision global navigation satellite system navigation (GNSS). As accurate tropospheric parameters are obligatory in GNSS navigation and GNSS water vapor detection, high-precision modeling of tropospheric parameters has gained widespread attention in recent years. A new approach is introduced to develop an empirical tropospheric delay model named the China Tropospheric (CTrop) model, providing meteorological parameters based on the sliding window algorithm. The radiosonde data in 2017 are treated as reference values to validate the performance of the CTrop model, which is compared to the canonical Global Pressure and Temperature 3 (GPT3) model. The accuracy of the CTrop model in regards to pressure, water vapor pressure, temperature, and weighted mean temperature are 5.51 hPa, 2.60 hPa, 3.09 K, and 3.35 K, respectively, achieving an improvement of 6%, 9%, 10%, and 13%, respectively, when compared to the GPT3 model. Moreover, three different resolutions of the CTrop model based on the sliding window algorithm are also developed to reduce the amount of gridded data provided to the users, as well as to speed up the troposphere delay computation process, for which users can access model parameters of different resolutions for their requirements. With better accuracy of estimating the tropospheric parameters than that of the GPT3 model, the CTrop model is recommended to improve the performance of GNSS positioning and navigation.