Quality Assessment of Tropospheric Delay Estimated by Precise Point Positioning in the Korean Peninsula

Abstract

Over the last decade, the Global Navigation Satellite System (GNSS) has been increasingly utilized as a meteorological research tool. The Korea Astronomy and Space Science Institute (KASI) has also been developing a near real-time GNSS precipitable water vapor (PWV) information management system that can produce a precise PWV for the Korean Peninsula region using GNSS data processing and meteorological measurements. The goal of this paper is to evaluate whether the precise point positioning (PPP) strategy will be used as the new data processing strategy of the GNSS-PWV information management system. For this purpose, quality assessment has been performed by means of a comparative analysis of the troposphere zenith total delay (ZTD) estimates from KASI PPP solutions (KPS), KASI network solutions (KNS), and International GNSS Service (IGS) final troposphere products (IFTP) for ten permanent GNSS stations in the Korean Peninsula. The assessment consists largely of two steps: First, the troposphere ZTD of the KNS are compared to those of the IFTP for only DAEJ and SUWN, in which the IFTP are used as the reference. Second, the KPS are compared to the KNS for all ten GNSS stations. In this step, the KNS are used as a new reference rather than the IFTP, because it was proved in the previous step that the KNS can be a suitable reference. As a result, it was found that the ZTD values from both the KPS and the KNS followed the same overall pattern, with an RMS of 5.36 mm. When the average RMS was converted into an error of GNSS-PWV by considering the typical ratio of zenith wet delay and PWV, the GNSS-PWV error met the requirement for PWV accuracy in this application. Therefore, the PPP strategy can be used as a new data processing strategy in the near real-time GNSS-PWV information management system.