Method for evaluating real-time GNSS satellite clock offset products

Abstract

Real-time satellite clock offset products are frequently utilized in navigation and positioning service fields. The precision of such products is a key issue for their application. The evaluation methods existed for satellite clock offset products are mostly based on post-processed satellite clock offset solutions, which will encounter problems in real-time product evaluation, especially for real-time satellite clock offset products estimated from data with regional stations only. We propose an improved evaluation method for global navigation satellite system (GNSS) satellite clock offset products. In the proposed method, we use all-satellite reference method instead of single-satellite reference method to eliminate the timescale in satellite clock offset products. Moreover, a preprocessing step is suggested to detect gross errors and initial clock bias before evaluating the precision of the satellite clock offsets. We conduct two examples to verify our method, and the experimental results show that the proposed method is more reasonable in assessing the GNSS satellite clock offset precision, and it also provides a reliable approach to analyzing the estimated satellite clock offset in both real-time and post-processed, or globally and regionally.