Implementation of Ready-Made Hydrostatic Delay Products for Timely GPS Precipitable Water Vapor Retrieval Over Complex Topography: A Case Study in the Tibetan Plateau

Abstract

For the timely retrieval of global positioning system based precipitable water vapor (GPS-PWV) over complex topography when there is no in situ pressure-derived zenith hydrostatic delays (ZHDs), this article evaluates three types of ready-made ZHD products, including two newly released products from the Vienna University of Technology (TU Wien, TUW-VMF3) and GeoForschungsZentrum Potsdam (GFZ-VMF1) and a legacy product TUW-VMF1. We implement them for the first time for GPS-PWV retrieval in regions with highly variable topography, such as the Tibetan plateau (TP). First, we present a refined method [model-assisted ZHD height adjustment, model-assisted ZHD height adjustment (MAZHA)] for implementing the above VMF1/VMF3-like ZHD products. The results reveal that the MAZHA method improves the implementation accuracy over the TP by 70% compared to the conventional method. Then, the above multisource VMF1/VMF3-like ZHD products are evaluated using the in situ pressure-derived ZHDs across the TP. The results show that the GFZ-VMF1 outperforms the TUW-VMF1 mainly because a more advanced underlying numerical weather model (ERA5) are adopted. TUW-VMF3 achieves the best performance mainly because it is provided with improved horizontal resolution. Finally, we find that implementing the state-of-the-art TUW-VMF3 ZHD product for GPS-PWV retrieval yields no statistically significant errors, even under extreme weather conditions, and the retrieved GPS-PWVs can well characterize the PWV diurnal variations in all seasons except winter. Additionally, considering the fact that the operational and forecasted TUW-VMF3 ZHDs present almost equivalent performance, this article is also beneficial to real-time GPS-PWV retrieval using forecasted TUW-VMF3 ZHDs, thus allowing for the ease of real-time GPS-PWV retrieval.