In the daily operation of regional GNSS (Global Navigation Satellite System) networks, the formal errors of all stations’ coordinate components are calculated. However, spatiotemporal filtering based on traditional Principal Component Analysis (PCA) for regional GNSS position time series does not take these formal errors into account. This paper developed a PCA-based approach to extract Common Mode Error (CME) from the position time series of a regional GNSS station network, where formal errors were applied to construct a weight factor. Because coordinate components with larger errors have smaller weight factors in extracting CME, the performance of our proposed approach was anticipated to be better than the traditional PCA approach. The position time series of 25 stations in the Yunnan Province, China, were analyzed using our approach, as well as the traditional PCA approach. The average errors of the residual time series after removing the CMEs with our approach were 1.30 mm, 1.72 mm, and 4.62 mm for North, East and Up components, and the reductions with respect to those of the original time series were 18.23%, 15.42%, and 18.25%, respectively. If CMEs were removed from the traditional PCA approach, the corresponding average errors were 1.34 mm, 1.81 mm, and 4.84 mm, with reductions of 15.84%, 10.86%, and 14.32%, respectively. Compared to the traditional PCA approach, the average errors of our approach were reduced by about 2.39%, 4.56%, and 3.93% in the North, East and Up components, respectively. Analysis of CME indicated that it mainly contained white and flicker noise. In the synthetic position time series with 500 repeated simulations, the CME extracted by our approach was closer to the true simulated values than those extracted by the traditional PCA approach, regardless of whether local effects were considered or not. Specifically, the mean root mean square (RMS) reduction of our approach, relative to PCA, ranged from 1.35% to 3.93%. Our simulations illustrated that the RMS reductions depended not only on the magnitude, but also the variation of the formal error series, which further highlights the necessity of considering formal errors in spatiotemporal filtering.

Empirical modal decomposition (EMD) is an efficient tool for extracting a signal from stationary or non-stationary time series and is enhanced in stability and robustness by ensemble empirical mode decomposition (EEMD). Adaptive EEMD further improves computational efficiency through adaptability in the white noise amplitude and set average number. However, its effectiveness in the periodic signal extraction in Global Navigation Satellite System (GNSS) coordinate time series regarding the inevitable missing data and offset issues has not been comprehensively validated. In order to thoroughly investigate their impacts, we simulated 5 years of daily time series data with different missing data percentages or a different number of offsets and conducted them 300 times for each simulation. The results show that high accuracy could reach the overall random missing rate below 15 % and avoid consecutive misses exceeding 30 d. Meanwhile, offsets should be corrected in advance regardless of their magnitudes. The analysis of the vertical components of 13 stations within the Australian Global Sea Level Observing System (GLOSS) monitoring network demonstrates the advantage of adaptive EEMD in revealing the time-varying characteristics of periodic signals. From the perspectives of correlation coefficients (CCs), root mean square error (RMSE), power spectral density indices (κ) and signal-to-noise ratio (SNR), the means for adaptive EEMD are 0.36, 0.81, −0.18 and 0.48, respectively, while for least squares (LS), they are 0.27, 0.86, −0.50 and 0.23. Meanwhile, a significance test of the residuals further substantiates the effectiveness in periodic signal extraction, which shows that there is no annual signal remaining. Also, the longer the series, the higher the accuracy of the reasonable extracted periodic signal concluded via the significance test. Moreover, driving factors are more effectively facilitated by the time-varying periodic characteristics compared with the constant periodic signal derived by LS. Overall, the application of adaptive EEMD could achieve high accuracy in analyzing GNSS time series, but it should be based on properly dealing with missing data and offsets.

Benefits from the modernized US Global Positioning System (GPS), the revitalized Russian GLObal NAvigation Satellite System (GLONASS), and the newly-developed Chinese BeiDou Navigation Satellite System (BDS) and European Galileo, multi-constellation Global Navigation Satellite System (GNSS) has emerged as a powerful tool not only in positioning, navigation, and timing (PNT), but also in remote sensing of the atmosphere and ionosphere. Both precise positioning and the derivation of atmospheric parameters can benefit from multi-GNSS observations. In this contribution, extensive evaluations are conducted with multi-GNSS datasets collected from 134 globally-distributed ground stations of the International GNSS Service (IGS) Multi-GNSS Experiment (MGEX) network in July 2016. The datasets are processed in six different constellation combinations, i.e., GPS-, GLONASS-, BDS-only, GPS + GLONASS, GPS + BDS, and GPS + GLONASS + BDS + Galileo precise point positioning (PPP). Tropospheric gradients are estimated with eight different temporal resolutions, from 1 h to 24 h, to investigate the impact of estimating high-resolution gradients on position estimates. The standard deviation (STD) is used as an indicator of positioning repeatability. The results show that estimating tropospheric gradients with high temporal resolution can achieve better positioning performance than the traditional strategy in which tropospheric gradients are estimated on a daily basis. Moreover, the impact of estimating tropospheric gradients with different temporal resolutions at various elevation cutoff angles (from 3° to 20°) is investigated. It can be observed that with increasing elevation cutoff angles, the improvement in positioning repeatability is decreased.