ACCURACY ASSESSMENT OF PRECISE POINT POSITIONING WITH MULTI-CONSTELLATION GNSS DATA UNDER STRONG SOLAR BURST EFECTS

Abstract

Solar variations modify a layer of the Earth’s upper atmosphere known as the ionosphere. This is of particular concern for the aviation sector because of the way its communications and navigation systems can be affected. At the same time, one of the most complex atmospheric effects is the response of ionospheric regions to geomagnetic storms. The ionospheric response during the same storm can vary in time in different locations, which can introduce significant errors/displacement (meters) in single-frequency relative GNSS positioning (DGNSS technology). The residual effect can be somewhat mitigated by using dual- or multi-frequency GNSS, but dual frequency is not a guarantee against degradation of relative observations results, especially during significant geomagnetic storms. In this regard, PPP absolute positioning technology can be effective. However, another atmospheric effect – ionospheric scintillation can have a significant impact on the accuracy of both GNSS positioning approaches. The main goal of this study was to analyze the effect of second-order ionospheric delay during geomagnetic storms and ionospheric scintillations on GNSS positioning using the PPP method. GNSS data corrected and uncorrected for higher-order ionospheric delay, respectively, were processed by the static PPP-AR method using the PRIDE-PPPAR ver.2.2.6 software for the selected periods of geomagnetic storms. From the analysis of the influence of second-order ionospheric errors, it follows that their values can reach almost 4 cm for first-frequency signals under different states of ionospheric disturbances for the GPS constellation and almost an order of magnitude less for the GNSS quadroconstellation. The appearance of stronger geomagnetic storms increases the second-order ionospheric errors by several millimeters.