Estimating the 3D Time Variable Water Vapor Contents of the Troposphere from a Single GNSS Receiver

TL;DR

This paper introduces a novel algorithm to estimate 3D water vapor content in the troposphere using a single GNSS receiver by modeling water vapor distribution with exponential decay and low-degree polynomial functions.

Contribution

The paper presents a new method combining exponential scale height assumptions with Zernike and Tchebyshev functions for 3D water vapor modeling from GNSS data.

Findings

Successful inversion of water vapor distribution over one day at Tahiti

Demonstrates the feasibility of single-receiver 3D water vapor estimation

Provides a new approach for atmospheric water vapor monitoring

Abstract

We describe here a new algorithm to model the water contents of the atmosphere from GNSS slant wet delays relative to a single receiver. We first make the assumption that the water vapor contents are mainly governed by a scale height (exponential law), and secondly that the departures from this decaying exponential can be mapped as a set of low degree 3D Zernike functions (w.r.t. space) and Tchebyshev polynomials (w.r.t. time.) We give an example of inversion with data acquired over a one day time span at the Geodesy Observatory of Tahiti.