Ionospheric correction using GPS Klobuchar coefficients with an empirical night-time delay model

Abstract

We proposed an ionospheric correction approach called NKlob to mitigate the ionospheric delay errors. NKlob is a modification of the original GPS Ionospheric Correction Algorithm (ICA), which uses an empirical night-time model depending on the time, geomagnetic location and periodicities of the ionospheric behavior to replace the night-time constant delay in GPS ICA. Performance of NKlob was evaluated by the independent total electron contents (TECs) derived from Global Ionospheric Maps (GIMs) of the International GNSS Services (IGS) and Jason-2 altimetry satellite during 2013–2017. Compared to GIM TECs, NKlob corrects 51.5% of the ionospheric delay errors, which outperforms GPS ICA by 6.3%. Compared to Jason-2 TECs, NKlob mitigates the ionospheric errors by 58.1%, which is approximately 3.7% better than that of GPS ICA. NKlob shows significant improvement in low-latitude and equatorial regions with respect to GPS ICA, meanwhile exhibiting comparable performance at middle and high latitudes. Since NKlob only requires slight technical changes at the processing level of GPS receivers, we suppose that it can be easily implemented for better ionospheric delay corrections of real-time GPS single-frequency applications.