scholarly journals Troposphere Water Vapour Tomography: A Horizontal Parameterised Approach

2018 ◽  
Vol 10 (8) ◽  
pp. 1241 ◽  
Author(s):  
Qingzhi Zhao ◽  
Yibin Yao ◽  
Wanqiang Yao

Global Navigation Satellite System (GNSS) troposphere tomography has become one of the most cost-effective means to obtain three-dimensional (3-d) image of the tropospheric water vapour field. Traditional methods divide the tomography area into a number of 3-d voxels and assume that the water vapour density at any voxel is a constant during the given period. However, such behaviour breaks the spatial continuity of water vapour density in a horizontal direction and the number of unknown parameters needing to be estimated is very large. This is the focus of the paper, which tries to reconstruct the water vapor field using the tomographic technique without imposing empirical horizontal and vertical constraints. The proposed approach introduces the layered functional model in each layer vertically and only an a priori constraint is imposed for the water vapor information at the location of the radiosonde station. The elevation angle mask of 30° is determined according to the distribution of intersections between the satellite rays and different layers, which avoids the impact of ray bending and the error in slant water vapor (SWV) at low elevation angles on the tomographic result. Additionally, an optimal weighting strategy is applied to the established tomographic model to obtain a reasonable result. The tomographic experiment is performed using Global Positioning System (GPS) data of 12 receivers derived from the Satellite Positioning Reference Station Network (SatRef) in Hong Kong. The quality of the established tomographic model is validated under different weather conditions and compared with the conventional tomography method using 31-day data, respectively. The numerical result shows that the proposed method is applicable and superior to the traditional one. Comparisons of integrated water vapour (IWV) of the proposed method with that derived from radiosonde and European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts (ECMWF) ERA-Interim data show that the root mean square (RMS)/Bias of their differences are 3.2/−0.8 mm and 3.3/−1.7 mm, respectively, while the values of traditional method are 5.1/−3.9 mm and 6.3/−5.9 mm, respectively. Furthermore, the water vapour density profiles are also compared with radiosonde and ECMWF data, and the values of RMS/Bias error for the proposed method are 0.88/0.06 g/m3 and 0.92/−0.08 g/m3, respectively, while the values of the traditional method are 1.33/0.38 g/m3 and 1.59/0.40 g/m3, respectively.

2017 ◽  
Vol 35 (1) ◽  
pp. 87-95 ◽  
Author(s):  
Qingzhi Zhao ◽  
Yibin Yao

Abstract. The spatio-temporal distribution of atmospheric water vapour information plays a crucial role in the establishment of modern numerical weather forecast models and description of the different weather variations. A troposphere tomographic method has been proposed considering the signal rays penetrating from the side of the area of interest to solve the problem of the low utilisation rate of global navigation satellite system (GNSS) observations. Given the method above needs the establishment of a unit scale factor model using the radiosonde data at only one location in the research area, an improved approach is proposed by considering the reasonability of modelling data and the diversity of the modelling parameters for building a more accurate unit scale factor model. The new established model is established using grid point data derived from the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts (ECMWF) and evenly distributed in the tomographic area, which can enhance the number of calculated initial water vapour density values with high accuracy. We validated the improved method with respect to the previous methods, as well as the result from a radiosonde using data from 12 stations from the Hong Kong Satellite Positioning Reference Station Network. The obtained result shows that the number of initial values estimated by the new model is increased by 6.83 %, while the internal and external accuracies are 0.08 and 0.24 g m−3, respectively. Integrated water vapour (IWV) and water vapour density profile comparisons show that the improved method is superior to previous studies in terms of RMS, MAE, and bias, which suggests higher accuracy and reliability.


Author(s):  
Z. X. Mo ◽  
L. K. Huang ◽  
H. Peng ◽  
L. L. Liu ◽  
C. L. Kang

Abstract. Atmospheric water vapor is an important part of the earth's atmosphere, and it has a great relationship with the formation of precipitation and climate change. In CNSS-derived precipitable water vapor (PWV), atmospheric weighted mean temperature, Tm, is the key factor in the progress of retrieving PWV. In this study, using the profiles of Guilin radiosonde station in 2017, the spatiotemporal variation characteristics and relationships between Tm and surface temperature (Ts) are analyzed in Guilin, an empirical Tm model suitable for Guilin is constructed by regression analysis. Comparing the Tm values calculated from Bevis model, Li Jianguo model and new model, it is found that the root mean square error (RMSE) of new model is 2.349 K, which are decreased by 14% and 19%, respectively. Investigating the impact of different Tm models on GNSS-PWV, the Tm-induced error from new model has a smaller impact on PWV than other two models. The results show that the new Tm model in Guilin has a relatively good performance and it can improve the reliability of the regional GNSS water vapor retrieval to some extent.


2019 ◽  
Vol 11 (9) ◽  
pp. 1127 ◽  
Author(s):  
Fei Yang ◽  
Jiming Guo ◽  
Xiaolin Meng ◽  
Junbo Shi ◽  
Lv Zhou

With the development of Global Navigation Satellite System (GNSS) reference station networks that provide rich data sources containing atmospheric information, the precipitable water vapor (PWV) retrieved from GNSS remote sensing has become one of the most important bodies of data in many meteorological departments. GNSS stations are distributed in the form of scatters, generally, these separations range from a few kilometers to tens of kilometers. Therefore, the spatial resolution of GNSS-PWV can restrict some applications such as interferometric synthetic aperture radar (InSAR) atmospheric calibration and regional atmospheric water vapor analysis, which inevitably require the spatial interpolation of GNSS-PWV. This paper explored a PWV interpolation scheme based on the GPT2w model, which requires no meteorological data at an interpolation station and no regression analysis of the observation data. The PWV interpolation experiment was conducted in Hong Kong by different interpolation schemes, which differed in whether the impact of elevation was considered and whether the GPT2w model was added. In this paper, we adopted three skill scores, i.e., compound relative error (CRE), mean absolute error (MAE), and root mean square error (RMSE), and two approaches, i.e., station cross-validation and grid data validation, for our comparison. Numerical results showed that the interpolation schemes adding the GPT2w model could greatly improve the PWV interpolation accuracy when compared to the traditional schemes, especially at interpolation points away from the elevation range of reference stations. Moreover, this paper analyzed the PWV interpolation results under different weather conditions, at different locations, and on different days.


Nanomaterials ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 9 (1) ◽  
pp. 64 ◽  
Author(s):  
Qin Wang ◽  
Hui Xie ◽  
Zhiming Hu ◽  
Chao Liu

In this study, molecular dynamics simulations were carried out to study the coupling effect of electric field strength and surface wettability on the condensation process of water vapor. Our results show that an electric field can rotate water molecules upward and restrict condensation. Formed clusters are stretched to become columns above the threshold strength of the field, causing the condensation rate to drop quickly. The enhancement of surface attraction force boosts the rearrangement of water molecules adjacent to the surface and exaggerates the threshold value for shape transformation. In addition, the contact area between clusters and the surface increases with increasing amounts of surface attraction force, which raises the condensation efficiency. Thus, the condensation rate of water vapor on a surface under an electric field is determined by competition between intermolecular forces from the electric field and the surface.


Sensors ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 21 (13) ◽  
pp. 4566
Author(s):  
Dominik Prochniewicz ◽  
Kinga Wezka ◽  
Joanna Kozuchowska

The stochastic model, together with the functional model, form the mathematical model of observation that enables the estimation of the unknown parameters. In Global Navigation Satellite Systems (GNSS), the stochastic model is an especially important element as it affects not only the accuracy of the positioning model solution, but also the reliability of the carrier-phase ambiguity resolution (AR). In this paper, we study in detail the stochastic modeling problem for Multi-GNSS positioning models, for which the standard approach used so far was to adopt stochastic parameters from the Global Positioning System (GPS). The aim of this work is to develop an individual, empirical stochastic model for each signal and each satellite block for GPS, GLONASS, Galileo and BeiDou systems. The realistic stochastic model is created in the form of a fully populated variance-covariance (VC) matrix that takes into account, in addition to the Carrier-to-Noise density Ratio (C/N0)-dependent variance function, also the cross- and time-correlations between the observations. The weekly measurements from a zero-length and very short baseline are utilized to derive stochastic parameters. The impact on the AR and solution accuracy is analyzed for different positioning scenarios using the modified Kalman Filter. Comparing the positioning results obtained for the created model with respect to the results for the standard elevation-dependent model allows to conclude that the individual empirical stochastic model increases the accuracy of positioning solution and the efficiency of AR. The optimal solution is achieved for four-system Multi-GNSS solution using fully populated empirical model individual for satellite blocks, which provides a 2% increase in the effectiveness of the AR (up to 100%), an increase in the number of solutions with errors below 5 mm by 37% and a reduction in the maximum error by 6 mm compared to the Multi-GNSS solution using the elevation-dependent model with neglected measurements correlations.


Forests ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 12 (8) ◽  
pp. 975
Author(s):  
Antonio Copak ◽  
Vlatka Jirouš-Rajković ◽  
Nikola Španić ◽  
Josip Miklečić

Oriented strand board (OSB) is a commonly used structural wood-based panel for walls and roof siding, but recently the industry has become interested in OSB as a substrate for indoor and outdoor furniture. Particleboard is mainly used in furniture productions and has become popular as a construction material due to its numerous usage possibilities and inexpensive cost. Moisture is one of the most important factors affecting wood-based panel performance and the post-treatment conditions affected their affinity to water. When OSB and particleboard are used as substrates for coatings, their surface characteristics play an important role in determining the quality of the final product. Furthermore, roughness can significantly affect the interfacial phenomena such as adsorption, wetting, and adhesion which may have an impact on the coating performance. In this research particleboard and OSB panels were sanded, re-pressed and IR heated and the influence of surface treatments on hardness, roughness, wetting, water, and water vapour absorption was studied. Results showed that sanding improved the wetting of particleboard and OSB with water. Moreover, studied surface treatments increased water absorption and water penetration depth of OSB panels, and re-pressing had a positive effect on reducing the water vapour absorption of particleboard and OSB panels.


2021 ◽  
Vol 13 (15) ◽  
pp. 3014
Author(s):  
Feng Wang ◽  
Dongkai Yang ◽  
Guodong Zhang ◽  
Jin Xing ◽  
Bo Zhang ◽  
...  

Sea surface height can be measured with the delay between reflected and direct global navigation satellite system (GNSS) signals. The arrival time of a feature point, such as the waveform peak, the peak of the derivative waveform, and the fraction of the peak waveform is not the true arrival time of the specular signal; there is a bias between them. This paper aims to analyze and calibrate the bias to improve the accuracy of sea surface height measured by using the reflected signals of GPS CA, Galileo E1b and BeiDou B1I. First, the influencing factors of the delay bias, including the elevation angle, receiver height, wind speed, pseudorandom noise (PRN) code of GPS CA, Galileo E1b and BeiDou B1I, and the down-looking antenna pattern are explored based on the Z-V model. The results show that (1) with increasing elevation angle, receiver height, and wind speed, the delay bias tends to decrease; (2) the impact of the PRN code is uncoupled from the elevation angle, receiver height, and wind speed, so the delay biases of Galileo E1b and BeiDou B1I can be derived from that of GPS CA by multiplication by the constants 0.32 and 0.54, respectively; and (3) the influence of the down-looking antenna pattern on the delay bias is lower than 1 m, which is less than that of other factors; hence, the effect of the down-looking antenna pattern is ignored in this paper. Second, an analytical model and a neural network are proposed based on the assumption that the influence of all factors on the delay bias are uncoupled and coupled, respectively, to calibrate the delay bias. The results of the simulation and experiment show that compared to the meter-level bias before the calibration, the calibrated bias decreases the decimeter level. Based on the fact that the specular points of several satellites are visible to the down-looking antenna, the multi-observation method is proposed to calibrate the bias for the case of unknown wind speed, and the same calibration results can be obtained when the proper combination of satellites is selected.


2021 ◽  
Vol 13 (14) ◽  
pp. 2680
Author(s):  
Søren Skaarup Larsen ◽  
Anna B. O. Jensen ◽  
Daniel H. Olesen

GNSS signals arriving at receivers at the surface of the Earth are weak and easily susceptible to interference and jamming. In this paper, the impact of jamming on the reference station in carrier phase-based relative baseline solutions is examined. Several scenarios are investigated in order to assess the robustness of carrier phase-based positioning towards jamming. Among others, these scenarios include a varying baseline length, the use of single- versus dual-frequency observations, and the inclusion of the Galileo and GLONASS constellations to a GPS only solution. The investigations are based on observations recorded at physical reference stations in the Danish TAPAS network during actual jamming incidents, in order to realistically evaluate the impact of real-world jamming on carrier phase-based positioning accuracy. The analyses performed show that, while there are benefits of using observations from several frequencies and constellations in positioning solutions, special care must be taken in solution processing. The selection of which GNSS constellations and observations to include, as well as when they are included, is essential, as blindly adding more jamming-affected observations may lead to worse positioning accuracy.


2021 ◽  
pp. 152808372110142
Author(s):  
Ariana Khakpour ◽  
Michael Gibbons ◽  
Sanjeev Chandra

Porous membranes find natural application in various fields and industries. Water condensation on membranes can block pores, reduce vapour transmissibility, and diminish the porous membranes' performance. This research investigates the rate of water vapour transmission through microporous nylon and nanofibrous Gore-Tex membranes. Testing consisted of placing the membrane at the intersection of two chambers with varied initial humidity conditions. One compartment is initially set to a high ([Formula: see text]water vapour concentration and the other low ([Formula: see text], with changes in humidity recorded as a function of time. The impact of pore blockage was explored by pre-wetting the membranes with water or interposing glycerine onto the membrane pores before testing. Pore blockage was measured using image analysis for the nylon membrane. The mass flow rate of water vapour ( ṁv) diffusing through a porous membrane is proportional to both its area (A) and the difference in vapour concentration across its two faces ([Formula: see text], such that [Formula: see text] where K is defined as the moisture diffusion coefficient. Correlations are presented for the variation of K as a function of [Formula: see text]. Liquid contamination on the porous membrane has been shown to reduce the moisture diffusion rate through the membrane due to pore blockage and the subsequent reduced open area available for vapour diffusion. Water evaporation from the membrane's surface was observed to add to the mass of vapour diffusing through the membrane. A model was developed to predict the effect of membrane wetting on vapour diffusion and showed good agreement with experimental data.


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