Research papers of the week – January 30, 2023

Estera Trzcina; Witold Rohm; Kamil Smolak

Journal of Geodesy

Ministerial score = 140.0
Journal Impact Factor (2023) = 4.809 (Q1)

Water vapour is a highly variable constituent of the troposphere; thus, its high-resolution measurements are of great importanceto weather prediction systems. The Global Navigation Satellite Systems (GNSS) are operationally used in the estimation of thetropospheric state and assimilation of the results into the weather models. One of the GNSS techniques of troposphere sensingis tomography which provides 3-D fields of wet refractivity. The tomographic results have been successfully assimilated intothe numerical weather models, showing the great potential of this technique. The GNSS tomography can be based on twodifferent approaches to the parameterisation of the model’s domain, i.e. block (voxel-based) or grid (node-based) approach.Regardless of the parameterisation approach, the tomographic domain should be discretised, which is usually performed in aregular manner, with a grid resolution depending on the mean distance between the GNSS receivers. In this work, we proposea new parameterisation approach based on the optimisation of the tomographic nodes’ location, taking into account thenon-uniform distribution of the GNSS information in the troposphere. The experiment was performed using a dense networkof 16 low-cost multi-GNSS receivers located in Wrocław and its suburbs, with a mean distance of 3km. Cross-validationof four different parameterisation approaches is presented. The validation is performed based on the Weather Research andForecasting model as well as radiosonde observations. The new approach improves the results of wet refractivity estimationby 0.5–2 ppm in terms of RMSE, especially for altitudes of 0.5–2.0km.

DOI:10.1007/s00190-022-01691-0

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