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Application of ray-traced tropospheric slant delays to geodetic VLBI analysis / Armin Hofmeister in Journal of geodesy, vol 91 n° 8 (August 2017)  

Public [article]  inJournal of geodesy > vol 91 n° 8 (August 2017) . - pp 945–964 Titre : Application of ray-traced tropospheric slant delays to geodetic VLBI analysis Type de document : Article/Communication Auteurs : Armin Hofmeister, Auteur ; Johannes Böhm , Auteur Année de publication : 2017 Article en page(s) : pp 945–964 Note générale : bibliographie Langues : Anglais (eng) Descripteur : [Vedettes matières IGN] Géodésie spatiale [Termes IGN] données ITGB [Termes IGN] données météorologiques [Termes IGN] interférométrie à très grande base [Termes IGN] lancer de rayons [Termes IGN] retard troposphérique Résumé : (auteur) The correction of tropospheric influences via so-called path delays is critical for the analysis of observations from space geodetic techniques like the very long baseline interferometry (VLBI). In standard VLBI analysis, the a priori slant path delays are determined using the concept of zenith delays, mapping functions and gradients. The a priori use of ray-traced delays, i.e., tropospheric slant path delays determined with the technique of ray-tracing through the meteorological data of numerical weather models (NWM), serves as an alternative way of correcting the influences of the troposphere on the VLBI observations within the analysis. In the presented research, the application of ray-traced delays to the VLBI analysis of sessions in a time span of 16.5 years is investigated. Ray-traced delays have been determined with program RADIATE (see Hofmeister in Ph.D. thesis, Department of Geodesy and Geophysics, Faculty of Mathematics and Geoinformation, Technische Universität Wien. http://resolver.obvsg.at/urn:nbn:at:at-ubtuw:1-3444, 2016) utilizing meteorological data provided by NWM of the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts (ECMWF). In comparison with a standard VLBI analysis, which includes the tropospheric gradient estimation, the application of the ray-traced delays to an analysis, which uses the same parameterization except for the a priori slant path delay handling and the used wet mapping factors for the zenith wet delay (ZWD) estimation, improves the baseline length repeatability (BLR) at 55.9% of the baselines at sub-mm level. If no tropospheric gradients are estimated within the compared analyses, 90.6% of all baselines benefit from the application of the ray-traced delays, which leads to an average improvement of the BLR of 1 mm. The effects of the ray-traced delays on the terrestrial reference frame are also investigated. A separate assessment of the RADIATE ray-traced delays is carried out by comparison to the ray-traced delays from the National Aeronautics and Space Administration Goddard Space Flight Center (NASA GSFC) (Eriksson and MacMillan in http://lacerta.gsfc.nasa.gov/tropodelays, 2016) with respect to the analysis performances in terms of BLR results. If tropospheric gradient estimation is included in the analysis, 51.3% of the baselines benefit from the RADIATE ray-traced delays at sub-mm difference level. If no tropospheric gradients are estimated within the analysis, the RADIATE ray-traced delays deliver a better BLR at 63% of the baselines compared to the NASA GSFC ray-traced delays. Numéro de notice : A2017-461 Affiliation des auteurs : non IGN Thématique : POSITIONNEMENT Nature : Article nature-HAL : ArtAvecCL-RevueIntern DOI : 10.1007/s00190-017-1000-7 En ligne : https://doi.org/10.1007/s00190-017-1000-7 Format de la ressource électronique : URL article Permalink : https://documentation.ensg.eu/index.php?lvl=notice_display&id=86405 [article]