An Ionosphere TEC Monitoring Method Based on Real-time Multipath Error Estimation

Wei Zhao, Zhixue Zhang, Jinxian Zhao, Yonghui Zhu, Jing Zhao

Peer Reviewed

Abstract:	The ionosphere TEC, which is an important parameter of ionosphere characteristic, has widely applications in the domain of space weather monitoring and forecasting, earthquake prediction, navigation and communication. As the development of the Global Navigation Satellite System(GNSS), the ionosphere TEC monitoring is mainly based on GNSS signals. Compared with the monitoring method based on dual frequency carrier phase measurements, the monitoring method based on dual frequency pseudorange measurements has several advantages including high real time performance and low computation complexity. However, this method is susceptible to multipath error, which has been approved by ionosphere TEC monitoring through BeiDou IGSO signals. Due to station environment and signal elevation, the estimating error caused by multipath effect is still large even with multipath mitigating technique applied. This paper proposes an ionosphere TEC monitoring method through real-time multipath estimation to improve ionosphere TEC monitoring performance of BeiDou IGSO satellite. This method extracts the multipath error of IGSO satellite a sidereal day ago by postprocessing, and correct the multipath error of the pseudorange in real time. To enhance the error correction accuracy, we proposes a time difference calculating method based on two signals which comes from the same satellite and arrives at the same azimuth/elevation in two adjacent days according to the characteristic of the IGSO orbit. Experiment results demonstrate that this method can eliminate the fluctuation in the IGSO ionosphere TEC monitoring results caused by multipath. The monitoring precision is improved by more than 50%.
Published in:	Proceedings of the 28th International Technical Meeting of the Satellite Division of The Institute of Navigation (ION GNSS+ 2015) September 14 - 18, 2015 Tampa Convention Center Tampa, Florida
Pages:	3841 - 3848
Cite this article:	Zhao, Wei, Zhang, Zhixue, Zhao, Jinxian, Zhu, Yonghui, Zhao, Jing, "An Ionosphere TEC Monitoring Method Based on Real-time Multipath Error Estimation," Proceedings of the 28th International Technical Meeting of the Satellite Division of The Institute of Navigation (ION GNSS+ 2015), Tampa, Florida, September 2015, pp. 3841-3848.
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