A Regional GPS Experiment for Estimating the Spatial and Temporal Variations of Water Vapor

P. Elósegui, A. Rius, J.L. Davis, G. Ruffini, S. Keihm

Abstract:	We have investigated the spatial and temporal variations of atmospheric water vapor using estimates of zenith wet delay. These estimates were obtained from an experiment involving Global Positioning System (GPS) receivers at five sites near Madrid. Data were acquired for 14 consecutive days in December 1996. The intersite horizontal separation varied from 5 to 50 km (with a maximum altitude difference between sites of 400 m) and the sampling rate for the GPS observations was 30 s. The GPS data were used to estimate relative zenith wet delays. We performed an Empirical Orthogonal Function (EOF) analysis and find that the first eigenvector approximation contains over 60% of the water vapor variability. This value indicates that the estimates of zenith wet delay are highly correlated in both the space and time domains. We have calculated structure functions to characterize the statistical behavior of the first temporal eigenvector approximation from the previous EOF analysis. We find that the resulting structure functions are dissimilar to those previously calculated by other researchers. We have offered several hypotheses to explain these results.
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:	241 - 248
Cite this article:	Elósegui, P., Rius, A., Davis, J.L., Ruffini, G., Keihm, S., "A Regional GPS Experiment for Estimating the Spatial and Temporal Variations of Water Vapor," 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. 241-248.
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