The impact of relative and absolute GNSS positioning strategies on estimated coordinates and ZWD in the framework of meteorological applications

Since many years, the GNSS has been regarded by the meteorological community as one of the systems for atmospheric water vapour remote sensing. Time series of wet delays, estimated as by-products of accurate positioning, have been assimilated into numerical weather prediction models. However, a dedicated use the system for water vapour monitoring is still under investigation. Ad hoc dense networks have been designed and implemented to collect data at a high spatial resolution, baseline lengths lower than 10 km, with the aim of describing the high spatial and temporal variability of tropospheric water vapour. Within this framework, the paper reports a study on how the positioning strategy affects the estimated coordinates and tropospheric parameters. The study was conducted on the data collected by an experimental network of geodetic receivers, used as single or dual frequency ones. More specifically, investigations were made on the use of L1-only or iono-free combinations in differential positioning of receivers 100 to 10 km apart, finding that L1-only data provide more accurate results. Therefore, comparisons between local coordinates and ZWD obtained from relative and absolute positioning were performed to provide the statistics of the differences; the agreement between the results for short baselines is always better than 1 cm standard deviation. In order to assess the differences in the results that can be obtained from the two strategies when applied to the same observation set, a further comparison was carried out in terms of baseline components and ZWD increments. It results that, even for dense networks, the differential approach produces accurate results without losing information compared to the absolute one.