Precipitable Water Vapour Monitoring Using the Global Positioning System in Atlantic Canada

Chaochao Wang, Peter Dare

Abstract:	In Atlantic Canada, severe hurricanes that develop in the Atlantic Ocean and cross into eastern Canada can cause financial loss worth tens of millions of dollars. Better understanding of PWV behaviour during these weather conditions (and better prediction of their future behaviour) can be obtained by the continuous estimation of PWV over the whole area using a regional GPS network. In this research, the PWV will be retrieved using an existing GPS network available in Atlantic Canada. This network consists of seven GPS reference stations with collocated meteorological sensors with inter-station distances ranging from 5 to 200 km. The GPS data is processed using both Bernese and GIPSY software. A water vapour radiometer is collocated with one of the reference stations at the University of New Brunswick. It is calibrated using a 4-year radiosonde data set and then used as a reference for the GPS sensed ZWD evaluation. The ZWD is also calculated from radiosonde measurements using a ray-tracing technique. The two ZWD solutions from the different processing software packages, the IGS final tropospheric product, together with radiosonde observations, are compared with measurements from WVR. The GPS-sensed ZWD is converted to PWV with a constant scale factor, which is a function of mean weighted temperature in the atmosphere. Based on local historical radiosonde measurements, a novel mean weighted temperature model has been determined and used for this regional network. The temporal and spatial correlation of PWV over the whole region is also investigated using different baseline lengths.
Published in:	Proceedings of the 17th International Technical Meeting of the Satellite Division of The Institute of Navigation (ION GNSS 2004) September 21 - 24, 2004 Long Beach Convention Center Long Beach, CA
Pages:	2353 - 2361
Cite this article:	Wang, Chaochao, Dare, Peter, "Precipitable Water Vapour Monitoring Using the Global Positioning System in Atlantic Canada," Proceedings of the 17th International Technical Meeting of the Satellite Division of The Institute of Navigation (ION GNSS 2004), Long Beach, CA, September 2004, pp. 2353-2361.
Full Paper:	ION Members/Non-Members: 1 Download Credit Sign In