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Assessment of precipitable water vapor retrieved from precise point positioning with PPP-B2b service

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Abstract

Real-time precise point positioning (RT-PPP) is an effective method to retrieve precipitable water vapor (PWV), which has better timeliness compared with the European Center for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts Reanalysis (ERA5). The real-time service (RTS) required for RT-PPP broadcasted by network link may be affected by outages. The PPP-B2b service of the BeiDou satellite navigation system (BDS) provides RTS via satellite, which is suitable for PWV retrieving without the influence of network issues. However, previous studies have not addressed the assessment of PWV retrieved from PPP-B2b over the continent and ocean environments. Here, we show the retrieval performance of the tropospheric zenith delay (ZTD) and PWV with different RTS products. First, the ZTD accuracy of ERA5 is 16.5 mm, compared with 10.9 mm for the Centre National d’Etudes Spatiales (CNES) solution for the global positioning system (GPS). Meanwhile, the PPP-B2b-GPS is 26.4 mm, while GPS/BDS-3 shows an improvement of 34% over GPS only. Second, the PWV difference between PPP-B2b-GPS and ERA5 is 4.9 mm, and GPS/BDS-3 is 3.4 mm. The agreement between CNES and ERA5 is slightly better than that between PPP-B2b and ERA5, where the PWV accuracy of GPS and GPS-BDS-3 is 2.7 mm and 2.3 mm, respectively. Finally, the PWV using PPP-B2b GPS-BDS-3 for the shipboard experiments is consistent with the CNES results. The difference between them is within 1.5 mm after convergence. We anticipate our assay to be a starting point for applying PPP-B2b service in meteorological studies on land and maritime areas susceptible to network unavailability.

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Data availability

The RINEX data of IGS stations are freely available at the following link https://cddis.nasa.gov/archive/. The real-time satellite ephemeris can be retrieved from: http://www.ppp-wizard.net/products/REAL_TIME/. The shipborne GNSS observations are available upon request to Mr. Hao Yang at upcyanghao@163.com.

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Acknowledgements

Shengyue Ji acknowledges the support from the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant Nos. 42074028), and the Natural Science Foundation of Shandong Province, China (Grant Nos. ZR2020MD042). The authors thank the Editor in Chief, Hassan A. Babaie, and the anonymous reviewers for their valuable comments that helped the quality of the final manuscript.

Funding

This research was substantially supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant Nos. 42074028) and the Natural Science Foundation of Shandong Province, China (Grant Nos. ZR2020MD042).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Earth Sciences and Engineering, Hohai University, Nanjing, 211100, China

    Hao Yang, Xiufeng He & Vagner Ferreira

  2. College of Oceanography and Space Informatics, China University of Petroleum (East China), Qingdao, 266580, China

    Hao Yang & Shengyue Ji

  3. College of Geodesy and Geomatics, Shandong University of Science and Technology, Qingdao, 266590, China

    Ying Xu

  4. School of Mechanical and Automotive Engineering, Chuzhou Polytechnic, Chuzhou, 239000, China

    Susu Song

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  1. Hao Yang
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  2. Xiufeng He
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  3. Vagner Ferreira
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Contributions

All authors contributed to the study's conception and design. Hao Yang wrote the first draft of the manuscript and all authors commented on previous versions of the manuscript. All authors read and approved the final manuscript.

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Correspondence to Vagner Ferreira.

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The authors declare that they have no competing financial interests or personal relationships that could appear to influence the work reported in this paper.

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Communicated by: H. Babaie

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Yang, H., He, X., Ferreira, V. et al. Assessment of precipitable water vapor retrieved from precise point positioning with PPP-B2b service. Earth Sci Inform 16, 315–328 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12145-023-00939-3

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