Analysis of higher-order ionospheric effects on GNSS precise point positioning in the China area

Abstract

Higher-order ionospheric error may reach several millimetres in the case of high ionospheric activity, which affects some high-accuracy applications, such as crustal movement monitoring, earthquake disaster prediction, plate motion monitoring and coordinate frame maintenance. However, accounting for higher-order ionospheric error is not yet a common strategy for regional global navigation satellite system (GNSS) network data processing. This study investigates the higher-order ionospheric effects on precise point positioning (PPP) in the China area with GNSS data selected from some IGS stations and some CMONOC stations. The Bernese GNSS software was used to calculate the effects of higher-order ionospheric error on the PPP estimated coordinates. The numerical results show that higher-order ionospheric positioning errors become larger as the station latitude decreases or the ionospheric activity increases. In addition, the positioning errors in the north direction are larger than those in the east and up directions and may reach 6 mm in south China.

Keywords:

• Higher-order ionospheric error
• CMONOC
• PPP
• Positioning error

Acknowledgements

We thank CMONOC for providing the GNSS data. We thank H. A. Marques, J. F. G. Monico and M. Aquino for providing the RINEX_HO software. We thank the IGS and CODE for providing data via its website.

Additional information

Funding

The financial support from the National Key Research and Development Plan (No. 2016YFB0501803) is greatly appreciated.