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Ionospheric delay corrections for single-frequency GPS receivers over Europe using tomographic mapping

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Abstract

The majority of navigation satellites receivers operate on a single frequency and experience a positioning error due to the ionospheric delay. This can be compensated for using a variety of approaches that are compared in this paper. The study focuses on the last solar maximum. A 4D tomographic imaging technique is used to map the ionospheric electron density over the European region during 2002 and 2003. The electron density maps are then used to calculate the excess propagation delay on the L1 frequency experienced by GPS receivers at selected locations across Europe. The excess delay is applied to correct the pseudo-range single frequency observations at each location and the improvements to the resulting positioning are calculated. The real-time tomographic technique is shown to give navigation solutions that are better than empirical modelling methods and approach the accuracy of the full dual-frequency solution. The improvements in positioning accuracy vary from day to day depending on ionospheric conditions but can be up to 25 m during mid-day during these solar maximum conditions at European mid-latitudes.

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Acknowledgments

We are grateful to the International GNSS Service (IGS) and EUREF for the GPS observation data and again to the IGS for the GPS precise ephemeris. We acknowledge the use of the International Reference Ionosphere (IRI) model and of the National Geophysical Data Center (NGDC) coastline data. We acknowledge the participation of Andrew Brown of the University of Southampton.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Electronic and Electrical Engineering, University of Bath, Bath, BA2 7AY, UK

    Damien J. Allain & Cathryn N. Mitchell

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  1. Damien J. Allain
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  2. Cathryn N. Mitchell
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Correspondence to Damien J. Allain.

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This project was funded by the EPSRC.

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Allain, D.J., Mitchell, C.N. Ionospheric delay corrections for single-frequency GPS receivers over Europe using tomographic mapping. GPS Solut 13, 141–151 (2009). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10291-008-0107-y

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10291-008-0107-y

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