Influence of the Ionospheric Refraction on the Repeatability of Distances Computed by GPS.

Rene Warnant

Abstract:	With the increasing solar activity, the ionosphere is going to become a major error source in GPS Geodesy. For this reason, the Royal Observatow of Belgium (ROB) has developed a method allowing to determine the ionospheric Total Electron Content (TEC) and to detect its irregular gradients using GPS dual frequency code and carrier beat phase measurements. The TEC is computed with a precision of 2-3 TEC Units. The TEC irregular gradients caused by the occurrence of Traveling Ionospheric Disturbances (TIlls) or scintilla-tion effects are automatically detected. TIDs are very common at Brussels, in particular, during the month of January between 10hOO and 16hO0 (local time). Their number is growing with the increasing solar activity. The etfixt of the ionosphere on GPS data processing is analyzed: TIDs gives rise to large residuals (and consequently errors) even when one uses an ionosphere-free combination. On the other hant the paper shows that the repeatability of baselines processed using the ionospherdme combination has a periodic behaviour which is very similar to the behaviour of the TEC time serie.
Published in:	Proceedings of the 10th International Technical Meeting of the Satellite Division of The Institute of Navigation (ION GPS 1997) September 16 - 19, 1997 Kansas City, MO
Pages:	217 - 223
Cite this article:	Warnant, Rene, "Influence of the Ionospheric Refraction on the Repeatability of Distances Computed by GPS.," Proceedings of the 10th International Technical Meeting of the Satellite Division of The Institute of Navigation (ION GPS 1997), Kansas City, MO, September 1997, pp. 217-223.
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