Performance of Ground-Based Global Navigation Satellite System Precipitable Water Vapor Retrieval in Beijing with the BeiDou B2b Service

Abstract

The accurate measurement of water vapor is essential for research about and the applications of meteorology, climatology, and hydrology. Based on the BeiDou PPP-B2b service, real-time precipitable water vapor (PWV) can be retrieved with the precise point positioning (PPP) software (XTW-PPP version 0.0). The experiment was conducted in Beijing in January 2023. Three solutions were designed with PPP using the BeiDou system only, the GPS system only, and the BeiDou-GPS combined solution. Real-time PWVs for the three solutions were validated with the ERA5 reanalysis data. Between the PWV values from the single BeiDou and ERA5, there was a bias of 0.7 mm and an RMSE of 1.8 mm. For the GPS case, the bias was 0.73 mm and the RMSE was 1.97 mm. The biases were less than 1 mm and RMSEs were less than 2 mm. Both the BeiDou and the GPS processing performed very well. But little improvement was found for the BeiDou-GPS combined solution, compared with the BeiDou system-only and the GPS system-only solution. This may be due to the poor handling of two different kinds of errors for the GPS and the BeiDou systems in our PPP software. A better PWV estimation with the two systems is to estimate PWV with a single system at the first step and then obtain the optimization by Bayesian model averaging.