Influence of Ionosphere Perturbations in GPS Time and Frequency Transfer

Sophie Pireaux, Pascale Defraigne, Nicolas Bergeot, Quentin Baire, and Carine Bruyninx

Abstract:	The stability of GPS time and frequency transfer is limited by the fact that GPS signals travel through the ionosphere. In high-precision geodetic time transfer (i.e. based on precise modelling of code and carrier-phase GPS data), the so-called ionosphere-free combination of the code and carrier-phase measurements made on the two frequencies is used to remove the first-order ionosphere effect. In this paper, we investigate the impact of residual second- and third-order ionosphere perturbations on geodetic time transfer solutions, using the ATOMIUM software developed at the Royal Observatory of Belgium (ROB). The impact of third-order ionosphere effects was shown to be negligible, while for second-order effects, the tests performed on different time links and at different epochs show a small effect of the order of some picoseconds, on a quiet day, and up to more than 10 picoseconds in case of high ionosphere activity.
Published in:	Proceedings of the 40th Annual Precise Time and Time Interval Systems and Applications Meeting December 1 - 4, 2008 Hyatt Regency Reston Town Center Reston, Virginia
Pages:	387 - 402
Cite this article:	Pireaux, Sophie, Defraigne, Pascale, Bergeot, Nicolas, Baire, Quentin, Bruyninx, Carine, "Influence of Ionosphere Perturbations in GPS Time and Frequency Transfer," Proceedings of the 40th Annual Precise Time and Time Interval Systems and Applications Meeting, Reston, Virginia, December 2008, pp. 387-402.
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