Accuracy Analysis of Real-Time Precise Point Positioning—Estimated Precipitable Water Vapor under Different Meteorological Conditions: A Case Study in Hong Kong

Abstract

Precipitable water vapor (PWV) monitoring with real-time precise point positioning (PPP) is required for the improved early detection of increasingly common extreme weather occurrences. This study takes Hong Kong as the research object. The aim is to explore the accuracy of real-time global navigation satellite system (GNSS) PPP in estimating PWV at low latitudes and under different weather conditions. In this paper, real-time PPP is realized by using observation data from continuously operating reference stations (CORS) in Hong Kong and real-time products from the Centre National d’Etudes Spatiales (CNES). The Tm model calculated using numerical weather prediction (NWP) data converts the zenith tropospheric delay (ZTD) of real-time PPP inversion into PWV and evaluates its accuracy using postprocessing products. The experimental results show that compared with GPS, multi-GNSS can reduce the convergence time of PPP by 29.20% during rainfall periods and by 12.06% during nonrainfall periods. The improvement in positioning accuracy is not obvious, and the positioning accuracy of the two is equivalent. Real-time PPP ZTD experiments show that there are lower average values for bias, standard deviation (STDEV), and root mean square (RMS) during nonrainfall periods than during rainfall periods. Real-time PPP PWV experiments show that there are also lower bias, STDEV, and RMS values during nonrainfall periods than during rainfall periods. The comparative study between rainfall and nonrainfall periods is of great significance for the real-time monitoring and forecasting of water vapor changes.