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Visualization of GNSS multipath effects and its potential application in IGS data processing

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Abstract

A modified multipath error mitigation method using the multi-point hemispherical grid model (MHGM) is proposed, and the influence of changes in the observation environments of IGS stations on their data quality is evaluated. The multipath error models of different satellite pairs for different observation periods can be established using the integrated multi-GNSS data in the proposed method. The test under deliberate high multipath environment reveals that this method can effectively estimate the GNSS multipath error, detect and present the orientation of the interference sources around the station. The RMS of residuals and the kinematic positioning accuracy on day 237 of 2018 are improved by 68% and 61%, respectively. Compared with the empirical site model (ESM), which can also visualize the effects of the multipath, the RMS of residuals when applying the MHGM is improved by 20%. The test with IGS historical observations shows that MHGM can effectively reflect the influence of changing multipath interference around stations on carrier phase observations, with an average improvement of 25% in the RMS of carrier phase residuals in the extrapolated 9-day validations over the past 18 years. The results of a kinematic positioning experiment in 2019 generally coincide with the RMS statistic results of carrier phase residuals as well. The MHGM demonstrates distinct potential in the influence evaluation of changes for the multipath interference around the stations on their observation quality.

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Data availability

The data collected under deliberate high multipath environment conditions can be obtained from the corresponding author. The historical IGS observations are publicly available, and they could be obtained from the FTP sites of IGS (ftp://cddis.gsfc.nasa.gov/pub/gps/data/daily).

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Acknowledgements

We are very grateful to the reviewers and editor for their helpful remarks for improving the manuscript. This study is financially supported by the National Key Research and Development Program of China (Grant Nos. 2018YFB0505201, 2017YFB0503702), National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant Nos. 41874037, 41804028), Joint Fund of Ministry of Education of China for Equipment Pre-research (Grant No. 6141A02022372) and the Wuhan Science and Technology Project (Grant No. 2018010401011271).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. GNSS Research Center, Wuhan University, 129 Luoyu Road, Wuhan, 430079, China

    Weiming Tang, Yawei Wang, Xuan Zou, Yangyang Li, Chenlong Deng & Jianhui Cui

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  1. Weiming Tang
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  2. Yawei Wang
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  3. Xuan Zou
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  4. Yangyang Li
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  5. Chenlong Deng
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  6. Jianhui Cui
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Contributions

WMT, XZ and YWW provided the initial idea and designed the research; XZ and YWW processed data and wrote the manuscript; YYL helped to accomplish some test; CLD and JHC helped with the writing. All authors provided critical feedback and helped to shape the analysis and manuscript.

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Xuan Zou.

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Tang, W., Wang, Y., Zou, X. et al. Visualization of GNSS multipath effects and its potential application in IGS data processing. J Geod 95, 103 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00190-021-01559-9

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