Residual Error Model to Bound Unmodeled Tropospheric Delays for Terrestrial Navigation Systems for Very Low Elevation Angles

Shrivathsan Narayanan

Peer Reviewed

Abstract: This paper proposes a residual tropospheric error model for terrestrial radio navigation systems used for civil aviation. Its functional scope ranges from elevation angles above 0.2° to zenith and aircraft distances up to 250 km. Existing tropospheric residual error model for GNSS employs a global constant to model only the variance of the zenith tropospheric delay error, and is not directly applicable for terrestrial ranging. The proposed model encompasses errors from tropospheric mapping functions, zenith delay models and atmospheric effects like ducting. In addition, the residual error model variance is derived to consider the variability of tropospheric delay as a function of elevation angle and aircraft range. The resulting residual error model is still conservative, and accurate to 0.74 mm/km for elevation angles down to 0.2° that will enable terrestrial systems to support increasingly demanding performance-based navigation systems.
Published in: Proceedings of the 36th International Technical Meeting of the Satellite Division of The Institute of Navigation (ION GNSS+ 2023)
September 11 - 15, 2023
Hyatt Regency Denver
Denver, Colorado
Pages: 3908 - 3922
Cite this article: Narayanan, Shrivathsan, "Residual Error Model to Bound Unmodeled Tropospheric Delays for Terrestrial Navigation Systems for Very Low Elevation Angles," Proceedings of the 36th International Technical Meeting of the Satellite Division of The Institute of Navigation (ION GNSS+ 2023), Denver, Colorado, September 2023, pp. 3908-3922. https://doi.org/10.33012/2023.19398
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