Outliers and uncertainties in GNSS ZTD estimates from double-difference processing and precise point positioning

Double-difference (DD) analysis and precise point positioning (PPP) are two widely used processing approaches to analyze ground-based GNSS measurements. We investigate the quality of the zenith tropospheric delay (ZTD) estimates produced from both processing approaches for a regional network over 1 year and show that DD solutions contain more numerous and larger ZTD outliers. The accuracy of both DD and PPP solutions strongly depends on the data processing procedure and models. We analyze the impact of mapping functions, satellite orbit and clock products and ambiguity resolution (fixed vs. float) on ZTD estimates. The results are assessed from station position repeatability and ZTD differences with respect to the ERA5 reanalysis. As expected, mapping functions have the strongest impact, with VMF1 being more accurate than GMF. Surprisingly, the impact of the ambiguity resolution and satellite products is rather weak in the PPP solution. We speculate that this results from the fact that final satellite products have reached a high level of accuracy and that other error sources now dominate static PPP solutions. A time and frequency analysis reveal unprecedented spurious sub-daily signals in the ZTD time series, which occur at the frequency of the GPS satellite repeat period and its harmonics. This suggests that sub-daily GPS ZTD estimates contain a significant part of the residual modeling errors due to satellite orbits, tidal models, mapping functions and multipath, which still need to be improved.

Automated summary

Double-difference (DD) analysis and precise point positioning (PPP) are two commonly used methods to analyze ground-based GNSS measurements. This study investigates the quality of zenith tropospheric delay (ZTD) estimates generated from both methods and finds that DD solutions have more and larger outliers. Mapping functions have the strongest impact on the accuracy of the solutions, while the impact of ambiguity resolution and satellite products is relatively weak in PPP solutions. The study also reveals spurious sub-daily signals in the ZTD time series.