Israel Kashani

Regional Ionosphere Mapping with Kriging and Multiquadric Methods

This paper demonstrates the concept and practical examples of instantaneous mapping of regional ionosphere, based on GPS observations from the State of Ohio continuously operating reference stations (CORS) network. Interpolation/prediction techniques, such as kriging (KR) and the Multiquadric Model (MQ), which are suitable for handling multi-scale phenomena and unevenly distributed data, were used to create total electron content (TEC) maps. Their computational efficiency (especially the MQ technique) and the ability to handle undersampled data (especially kriging) are particularly attractive. Presented here are the preliminary results based on GPS observations collected at five Ohio CORS stations (~100 km sta-tion separation and 1-second sampling rate). Dual frequency carrier phase and code GPS observations were used. A zero-difference approach was used for absolute TEC recovery. The quality of the ionosphere rep-resentation was tested by comparison to the International GPS Service (IGS) Global Ionosphere Maps (GIMs), which were used as a reference.

THE IMPACT OF THE IONOSPHERIC CORRECTION LATENCY ON LONG-BASELINE INSTANTANEOUS KINEMATIC GPS POSITIONING

Abstract The primary objective of this paper is to estimate the influence of the double-difference (DD) ionospheric corrections latency on the instantaneous (one-epoch) ambiguity resolution (AR) in longrange RTK under typical ionospheric conditions. The key to the success in integer AR rests mainly in the mitigation of the atmospheric errors, i.e., the ionospheric and tropospheric delays. Between these two, the former has the greatest influence on the AR, since both ambiguities and ionospheric delay are frequency-dependent. Instantaneous RTK is presently one of the most challenging topics in precise GPS applications. The research presented here addresses this topic through the development and testing of a multiple reference station approach implemented in the MPGPS™ (Multi Purpose GPS Processing Software) software. Atmospheric corrections are used in order to obtain a high quality RTK position over long distances. In our approach, DD ionospheric correction prediction derived from the previous correctly resolved epoch is applied. Yet, at the beginning of the session, a short initialization period is still required in order to produce the initial prediction. After the initialization the method is based on single epoch solution. This method assures a high success rate of the instantaneous AR for long baselines (over 100 km). Since the previous-epoch ionospheric delay is used, and instantaneous mode is applied in the algorithm, the proposed method is robust against cycle slips and data gaps, and still capable of producing centimetre-level RTK positions. The RTK solution was simulated in the post-processing mode. Namely, different DD ionospheric delay correction latencies were simulated in 10 s increments and sent to the (simulated) rover in order to test the AR performance. The AR results were compared and analyzed, and the performance of the RTK positioning was assessed based on the static true solution. Several hours of GPS data, collected by the State of Israel permanently tracking network, were processed. The analyses show that about 90 s latency may exist while the instantaneous ambiguities could still be resolved correctly. The numerical tests presented in this study show the centimetre-level positioning results for mobile receiver.