RESEARCH ARTICLE
Evaluation of Wet Mapping Functions Used in Modeling Tropospheric Propagation Delay Effect on GPS Measurements
Sobhy Abdel-Monam Younes*
Article Information
Identifiers and Pagination:
Year: 2017Volume: 11
First Page: 1
Last Page: 15
Publisher Id: TOASCJ-11-1
DOI: 10.2174/1874282301711010001
Article History:
Received Date: 03/01/2017Revision Received Date: 10/03/2017
Acceptance Date: 13/03/2017
Electronic publication date: 31/05/2017
Collection year: 2017
open-access license: This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International Public License (CC-BY 4.0), a copy of which is available at: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/legalcode. This license permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.
Abstract
Background:
The author compares several methods to map the a priori wet tropospheric delay of GNSS signals in Egypt from the zenith direction to lower elevations.
Methods and Materials:
The author compared the following mapping techniques against ray-traced delays computed for radiosonde profiles under the assumption of spherical symmetry: Saastamoinen, Hopfield, Black, Chao, Ifadis, Herring, Niell, Moffett, Black and Eisner and UNBabc mapping functions. Radiosonde data were computed from radiosonde stations at the Egyptian stations; in the south of Egypt, near the Mediterranean Sea, and near the Red Sea over a period of 5 years (2000-2005), most of the stations launched radiosonde twice daily, every day of the year. Moreover, data is received from the Egyptian Meteorology Authority.
Results and Conclusion:
The results indicate that currently, the saastamoinen mapping function should be used for all geodetic applications in Egypt, and if necessary, the Chao and Moffett mapping functions can serve as an acceptable replacement without introducing a significant bias into the station position.