It is anticipated that the performance of real‐time (RT) GNSS meteorology can be further improved by incorporating observations from multiple Global Navigation Satellite System (GNSS), including GPS, GLONASS, Galileo, and BeiDou. In this paper, an operational RT system for extracting zenith troposphere delay (ZTD) using a modified version of the Precise Point Positioning With Integer and Zero‐difference Ambiguity Resolution Demonstrator (PPP‐WIZARD) was established. GNSS, including GPS, GLONASS, and Galileo, observation streams were processed using RT Precise Point Positioning (PPP) strategy based on RT satellite orbit/clock products from the Centre National d'Etudes Spatiales. An experiment covering 30 days was conducted, in which the observation streams of 20 globally distributed stations were processed. The initialization time and accuracy of the RT troposphere results using single‐system and multisystem observations were evaluated. The effect of PPP ambiguity resolution was also evaluated. Results reveal that RT troposphere estimates based on single‐system observations can both be applied in weather nowcasting, in which the GPS‐only solution is better than the GLONASS‐only solution. The performance can also be improved by PPP ambiguity resolution and utilizing GNSS observations. Specifically, we notice that ambiguity resolution is more effective in improving the accuracy of ZTD, whereas the initialization process can be better accelerated by GNSS observations. Combining all techniques, the RT troposphere results with an average accuracy of about 8 mm in ZTD can be achieved after an initialization process of approximately 8.5 min, which demonstrates superior results for applying GNSS observations and ambiguity resolution for RT meteorological applications.

Within the Yaogan-30 series satellites, the low-cost single-frequency Global Positioning System/BeiDou Navigation Satellite System (GPS/BDS) receiver was employed for onboard real-time navigation. This article presents the in-flight performance of the single-frequency GPS/BDS receiver, including the tracking of GPS/BDS satellites, the noise of measurements, and the orbit accuracy of onboard real-time navigation results. First, in terms of satellites tracking, no BDS-2 satellites are tracked in 30–40% of all the time, four to seven BDS-2 satellites can be observed for less than 15% of the time, and only one to three BDS-2 satellites are available for the rest time, whereas 7–12 GPS satellites are tracked for the vast majority of the time. Obviously, the GPS observations play a more important role than BDS-2 data in real-time navigation and precise orbit determination (POD). Although the receivers only provide the single-frequency C/A-code pseudorange measurements without carrier-phases output, the accuracies of postprocessed POD could arrive at the level of 10–25 cm in terms of 3-D position. Hence, the post precise orbits are used as the reference for the assessment of real-time navigation accuracy. The assessment results demonstrate that the onboard real-time navigation accuracies of 2.0–3.5 m for 3-D position and 10.0–13.0 mm/s for 3-D velocity are achievable. At the same time, the statistics on the C/A-code pseudorange residuals after POD processing reflects that the noises of measurements from GPS and BDS-2 satellites are at the same level of 0.5–1.6 m. It should be noted that there is a notable velocity deviation of up to about 7.6 mm/s. Nevertheless, even with this obvious systematic error, the current velocity accuracy could still meet the real-time requirements of the small Yaogan-30 series satellites. In addition, some offline simulative solutions with tuned strategy settings are tested to validate the potential real-time navigation accuracy improvement. The simulation experiment tests results illustrate that a higher real-time orbit accuracy of roughly 1.0 m for 3-D position and 1.0 mm/s for 3-D velocity could be obtainable, if an optimized power spectral density of estimated empirical accelerations and a slightly higher order and degree of gravity model (50×50) are adopted. All the above analyses show that the single-frequency pseudorange Global Navigation Satellite System receiver is a high cost-effective sensor and has a wide horizon of application in the aerospace market.

Compared with current GNSS, which consists of medium- and high-altitude orbit satellites, Low Earth Orbit (LEO) satellites move faster and can greatly improve the observing geometry. In this contribution, LEO constellation augmented GNSS (LeGNSS) troposphere estimation is investigated, and the impacts of relevant factors are analyzed in detail. When the temporal resolutions of zenith troposphere delay (ZTD) and horizontal gradients are 1 h and 2 h, while standard deviations (STDs) of phase and pseudorange observations at the zenith direction are 0.005 m and 0.5 m, the accuracies of ZTD, north gradient, and east gradient augmented by LEO constellation improve by 15.7%, 29.6%, and 16.4%, respectively, compared with GNSS solution. The results of troposphere estimation under obstructed environment and using low-cost dual frequency receivers also become more robust after adding LEO observations. Most importantly, analysis results during periods with rapid varying troposphere parameters suggest that the contribution of LEO constellation becomes even bigger with increasing temporal resolutions of ZTD and horizontal gradients, indicating that LeGNSS can be used to extract tropospheric parameters with improved accuracies at high temporal resolution. Thus, the capability in rapidly capturing severe weather events can be improved by LeGNSS observations, and the performance can become even better with increasing number of LEO satellites. All these results suggest that LeGNSS might be an important tool in improving the performance of troposphere estimation, and would promote GNSS application in water vapor monitoring.

Troposphere modelling accuracy can seriously influence the performance of precise global navigation satellite system (GNSS) positioning. The temporal interpolation accuracies of troposphere parameters become important with the improvement in troposphere modelling, especially during the periods of severe weather changes. In this study, a one-month experiment was conducted for 10 EUREF Permanent GNSS Network stations to analyse the temporal interpolation errors of numerical weather model derived troposphere parameters and their influences on GNSS station coordinate and troposphere estimation. The root mean square of the differences between the 1- and 6-hourly European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts reanalysis v5-derived troposphere parameters are 0.72/11.52 mm for the zenith hydrostatic/zenith wet delay (ZWD), while they are 7.09/91.84 mm for the slant hydrostatic/wet delay at a 3 ∘ elevation angle. The corresponding influences on the estimated upper component and ZWD are 1.28 and 0.79 mm, respectively, in the daily static Precise Point Positioning ambiguity resolution solutions. However, the accuracy improvements are insignificant in the daily static solutions, mainly due to the drop of temporal interpolation errors with increasing elevation angles and the influence of other unmodeled systematic errors. In the 4-hourly static solutions, the accuracies of the up component improve 0.51 mm (5.9% in relative) and 0.29 mm (3.5% in relative) during the severe and stable periods, respectively. These impacts cannot be ignored in some GNSS subdaily applications, for example, monitoring non-tidal ocean loading effects, bedrock and monument thermal elastic effects, etc.