Impact of the initial tropospheric zenith path delay on precise point positioning convergence during active conditions

Abstract

Tropospheric delay is one of the key factors that influence the convergence time of the precise point positioning (PPP) method. Current models do not allow for the fixing of the zenith path delay tropospheric parameter, leaving the difference between nominal and final value to the estimation process. Here, we present an analysis of several PPP result-sets using the tropospheric parameter’s nominal value adopted from models: VMF1, GPT2w, MOPS, and ZERO-WET. The last variant assumes a zero value for the initial wet part of the zenith delay. The PPP results are subtracted from a solution based on the final tropospheric product from the International GNSS Service (IGS). Several days exhibiting the most active tropospheric conditions were selected for each of the 7 stations located in the mid-latitude Central European region. During the active days, application of the VMF1 model increases the resulting height component’s quality by about 33–36% when compared to the GPT2w and MOPS. The respective improvement in VMF1 latitude and longitude components is 27% and 15%. The average relative deterioration in the result standard deviations between active and calm tropospheric conditions reaches about 20–30% of the former. We discuss the impact of the initial tropospheric parameter’s variance and bias on positioning. In addition, we compare the results with those of other studies over the impact of active tropospheric conditions on the PPP method.