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Estimation and analysis of the short-term variations of multi-GNSS receiver differential code biases using global ionosphere maps

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Abstract

Care should be taken to minimize the adverse impact of differential code biases (DCBs) on global navigation satellite systems (GNSS)-derived ionospheric information determinations. For the sake of convenience, satellite and receiver DCB products provided by the International GNSS Service (IGS) are treated as constants over a period of 24 h (Li et al. (2014)). However, if DCB estimates show remarkable intra-day variability, the DCBs estimated as constants over 1-day period will partially account for ionospheric modeling error; in this case DCBs will be required to be estimated over shorter time period. Therefore, it is important to further gain insight into the short-term variation characteristics of receiver DCBs. In this contribution, the IGS combined global ionospheric maps and the German Aerospace Center (DLR)-provided satellite DCBs are used in the improved method to determine the multi-GNSS receiver DCBs with an hourly time resolution. The intra-day stability of the receiver DCBs is thereby analyzed in detail. Based on 1 month of data collected within the multi-GNSS experiment of the IGS, a good agreement within the receiver DCBs is found between the resulting receiver DCB estimates and multi-GNSS DCB products from the DLR at a level of 0.24 ns for GPS, 0.28 ns for GLONASS, 0.28 ns for BDS, and 0.30 ns for Galileo. Although most of the receiver DCBs are relatively stable over a 1-day period, large fluctuations (more than 9 ns between two consecutive hours) within the receiver DCBs can be found. We also demonstrate the impact of the significant short-term variations in receiver DCBs on the extraction of ionospheric total electron content (TEC), at a level of 12.96 TECu (TEC unit). Compared to daily receiver DCB estimates, the hourly DCB estimates obtained from this study can reflect the short-term variations of the DCB estimates more dedicatedly. The main conclusion is that preliminary analysis of characteristics of receiver DCB variations over short-term intervals should be finished prior to estimate daily multi-GNSS receiver DCB products.

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Acknowledgements

This work is supported by the National key Research Program of China “Collaborative Precision Positioning Project” (No. 2016YFB0501900), China Natural Science Funds (Nos. 41231064, 41674022, 41604031). Many thanks go to the IGS MGEX and DLR for providing access to multi-GNSS data and DCB as well as ionospheric GIM products.

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Correspondence to Min Li or Yunbin Yuan.

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Li, M., Yuan, Y., Wang, N. et al. Estimation and analysis of the short-term variations of multi-GNSS receiver differential code biases using global ionosphere maps. J Geod 92, 889–903 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00190-017-1101-3

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