Tropospheric products from high-level GNSS processing in Latin America

M.V. MACKERN; M.L. MATEO; M. F. CAMISAY; P.V.MORICHETTI

Simposio; 27th IUGG General Assembly; 2019

The present geodetic reference frame in Latin America and the Caribbean is given by a network of about 400 continuously operating GNSS stations. These stations are routinely processed by ten Analysis Centres following the guidelines and standards set up by the International Earth Rotation and Reference Systems Service (IERS) and International GNSS Service (IGS). The Analysis Centres estimate daily and weekly station positions and station zenith tropospheric path delays (ZTD) with an hourly sampling rate. This contribution presents some attempts aiming at combining the individual ZTD estimations to generate consistent troposphere solutions over the entire region and to provide reliable time series of troposphere parameters, which may be used in meteorological applications like numerical weather prediction and nowcasting/forecasting. The study covers ZTD and IWV series from a period a time-span of 5 years (2014-2018). In addition to the combination of the individual solutions, some advances based on the precise point positioning technique using BNC software (BKG NTRIP Client), the PPP-Wizard module (Precise Point Positioning with Integer and Zero-difference Ambiguity Resolution Demonstrator) both in post-process mode and Bernese GNSS Software V.5.2 are presented. Results are validated using the IGS ZTD products and IWV radiosonde data. The agreement was evaluated in terms of mean bias and RMS of the ZTD and IWV differences