A revised BDS Klobuchar model with a non-symmetrical processing strategy and a high-latitude amplitude constraint

Abstract

The BeiDou Navigation Satellite System (BDS) broadcasts the BDS Klobuchar model (BDSK) for ionospheric delay correction in both BDS-2 regional service phase and BDS-3 global service phase. Unlike the GPS Klobuchar model, the BDSK model adopts a simple “symmetrical strategy” due to the limited ionospheric input data within China, which results in inaccurate total electron content (TEC) estimation in the southern hemisphere. Besides, the “high latitude anomaly” occurs in the BDSK model due to the lack of latitude limitation strategy, which deteriorates the accuracy of the BDSK model in the southern hemisphere further. To solve this problem, we propose a revised BDS Klobuchar model (RBDK), in which the “non-symmetrical strategy” is adopted in the southern hemisphere and an amplitude constraint is introduced at high latitudes. For comparison, the fitted BDS Klobuchar model (BDFK) that is estimated using the same ionospheric input data and constraint algorithm for the RBDK model but with the “symmetrical strategy” is also included. First, we conduct a comparative analysis of the time series of the eight parameters for the BDSK, BDFK and RBDK models in 2021. The parameters of the BDFK and RBDK models are more stable, and there will be no abnormal jumping phenomenon that occurs in the BDSK model. Then, the performance of the broadcast BDSK model, the fitted BDFK model and the proposed RBDK model during the whole year of 2021 are evaluated by comparing them with the high-precision global ionospheric map (GIM) of the International GNSS Service (IGS). In the southern hemisphere, the root mean square (RMS) values of the BDSK and BDFK are 6.5 and 5.8 TEC unit (TECU), respectively, while that of the RBDK is 4.6 TECU, showing improvements of 29% and 21%, respectively. At high latitudes in the northern hemisphere, the RMS value of the BDSK is 7.6 TECU, while they are only 3.7 TECU for the RBDK and BDFK when the amplitude constraint is introduced. Final, we select 16 IGS stations to validate the performance of the BDSK, BDFK and RBDK models in the standard point positioning (SPP) domain in 2021. The average SPP accuracy of the BDSK is 8.88 m at 6 high-latitude stations, while they are 5.48 m for the RBDK and BDFK, showing significant improvement of 38%. Excluding the high-latitude stations, the SPP accuracy of the RBDK outperforms the BDFK and BDSK by 14% and 18%, respectively, at stations in the southern hemisphere. As expected, the proposed RBDK model shows significantly better performance in the southern hemisphere and at high latitudes in contrast to the broadcast BDSK model.