Temporal impact of selected GPS errors on point positioning

Abstract

This paper is aimed at investigating the stability of point positions over time in support of applications that require high position stability when differential GPS is not feasible. One such application is the use of a P3-Orion aircraft offshore for magnetic measurement in support of submarine detection. Temporal changes in several GPS errors lead to variability in the computed positions, so it is not the absolute errors, but rather their temporal variations that are of importance. Furthermore, the temporal variability of the different error sources may dictate a certain algorithm approach and processing strategy. This paper analyzes the temporal variations of the broadcast satellite clock model and orbit parameters, as well as ionospheric errors, because these will typically be the dominant errors for real-time point positioning. These three errors are analyzed independently. A tropospheric correction is applied when computing all of the position results, so the tropospheric error itself is not investigated. Satellite clock and orbit errors are analyzed by comparing broadcast and precise post-mission SV clock corrections and orbits. For the ionosphere, the effect is separated using dual-frequency data. The analysis comprises primarily of assessing error behaviors and magnitudes through time and frequency analyses. In this way, the differences in variability of the errors are easily determined. The effect of each error in the position domain is also investigated in addition to the combined effect. Results show that, on a typical day when single frequency data are processed with broadcast orbit and clock data, the root mean square (RMS) of the changes in the position errors over a 50-s interval is about 5.8 cm in northing, 4.0 in easting, and 11.0 cm in height. When using precise orbits and clocks, in addition to dual frequency data, these values improve by 46–56% to 2.7 cm in northing, 2.2 cm in easting, and 4.9 cm in height. Under severe ionospheric activity, the RMS of the errors decrease from 8.1 to 3.3 cm in northing, 5.7 to 2.6 cm in easting, and 17.0 to 4.9 cm in height, which are improvements of 54–71%.