scholarly journals An intercalibrated dataset of Total Column Water Vapour and Wet Tropospheric Correction based on MWR on board ERS-1, ERS-2 and Envisat

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ralf Bennartz ◽  
Heidrun Höschen ◽  
Bruno Picard ◽  
Marc Schröder ◽  
Martin Stengel ◽  
...  

Abstract. The Microwave Radiometers (MWR) on-board ERS-1, ERS-2, and Envisat provide a continuous time series of brightness temperature observations between 1991 and 2012. Here we report on a new Total Column Water Vapour (TCWV) and Wet Tropospheric Correction (WTC) dataset that builds on this time series. We use a one-dimensional variational approach to derive TCWV from MWR observations and ERA-Interim background information. A particular focus of this study lies on the intercalibration of the three different instruments, which is performed using constraints on liquid water path (LWP) and TCWV. Comparing our MWR-derived time series of TCWV against TCWV derived from Global Navigation Satellite System (GNSS) we find that the MWR-derived TCWV time series is stable over time. However, observations potentially affected by precipitation show a degraded performance compared to precipitation-free observations in terms of the accuracy of retrieved TCWV. An analysis of WTC shows further that the retrieved WTC is superior to purely model-derived WTC for all satellites and for the entire time series. Even compared to operational WTC retrievals, which incorporate additional observational data, the here-described dataset shows improvements in particular for the mid-latitudes and for the two earlier satellites ERS-1 and ERS-2. The dataset is publicly available under doi:10.5676/DWD_EMIR/V001.

2017 ◽  
Vol 10 (4) ◽  
pp. 1387-1402 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ralf Bennartz ◽  
Heidrun Höschen ◽  
Bruno Picard ◽  
Marc Schröder ◽  
Martin Stengel ◽  
...  

Abstract. The microwave radiometers (MWRs) on board the European Remote Sensing Satellites 1 and 2 (ERS-1 and ERS-2) and Envisat provide a continuous time series of brightness temperature observations between 1991 and 2012. Here we report on a new total column water vapour (TCWV) and wet tropospheric correction (WTC) dataset that builds on this time series. We use a one-dimensional variational approach to derive TCWV from MWR observations and ERA-Interim background information. A particular focus of this study lies on the intercalibration of the three different instruments, which is performed using constraints on liquid water path (LWP) and TCWV. Comparing our MWR-derived time series of TCWV against TCWV derived from Global Navigation Satellite System (GNSS) we find that the MWR-derived TCWV time series is stable over time. However, observations potentially affected by precipitation show a degraded performance compared to precipitation-free observations in terms of the accuracy of retrieved TCWV. An analysis of WTC shows further that the retrieved WTC is superior to purely ERA-Interim-derived WTC for all satellites and for the entire time series. Even compared to the European Space Agency's (ESA) operational WTC retrievals, which incorporate in addition to MWR additional observational data, the here-described dataset shows improvements in particular for the mid-latitudes and for the two earlier satellites, ERS-1 and ERS-2. The dataset is publicly available under doi:10.5676/DWD_EMIR/V001 (Bennartz et al., 2016).


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mahmoud Rajabi ◽  
Mstafa Hoseini ◽  
Hossein Nahavandchi ◽  
Maximilian Semmling ◽  
Markus Ramatschi ◽  
...  

<p>Determination and monitoring of the mean sea level especially in the coastal areas are essential, environmentally, and as a vertical datum. Ground-based Global Navigation Satellite System Reflectometry (GNSS-R) is an innovative way which is becoming a reliable alternative for coastal sea-level altimetry. Comparing to traditional tide gauges, GNSS-R can offer different parameters of sea surface, one of which is the sea level. The measurements derived from this technique can cover wider areas of the sea surface in contrast to point-wise observations of a tide gauge.  </p><p>We use long-term ground-based GNSS-R observations to estimate sea level. The dataset includes one-year data from January to December 2016. The data was collected by a coastal GNSS-R experiment at the Onsala space observatory in Sweden. The experiment utilizes three antennas with different polarization designs and orientations. The setup has one up-looking, and two sea-looking antennas at about 3 meters above the sea surface level. The up-looking antenna is Right-Handed Circular Polarization (RHCP). The sea-looking antennas with RHCP and Left-Handed Circular Polarization (LHCP) are used for capturing sea reflected Global Positioning System (GPS) signals. A dedicated reflectometry receiver (GORS type) provides In-phase and Quadrature (I/Q) correlation sums for each antenna based on the captured interferometric signal. The generated time series of I/Q samples from different satellites are analyzed using the Least Squares Harmonic Estimation (LSHE) method. This method is a multivariate analysis tool which can flexibly retrieve the frequencies of a time series regardless of possible gaps or unevenly spaced sampling. The interferometric frequency, which is related to the reflection geometry and sea level, is obtained by LSHE with a temporal resolution of 15 minutes. The sea level is calculated based on this frequency in six modes from the three antennas in GPS L1 and L2 signals.</p><p>Our investigation shows that the sea-looking antennas perform better compared to the up-looking antenna. The highest accuracy is achieved using the sea-looking LHCP antenna and GPS L1 signal. The annual Root Mean Square Error (RMSE) of 15-min GNSS-R water level time series compared to tide gauge observations is 3.7 (L1) and 5.2 (L2) cm for sea-looking LHCP, 5.8 (L1) and 9.1 (L2) cm for sea-looking RHCP, 6.2 (L1) and 8.5 (L2) cm for up-looking RHCP. It is worth noting that the GPS IIR block satellites show lower accuracy due to the lack of L2C code. Therefore, the L2 observations from this block are eliminated.</p>


Sensors ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 20 (14) ◽  
pp. 4059
Author(s):  
Nobuaki Kubo ◽  
Kaito Kobayashi ◽  
Rei Furukawa

The reduction of multipath errors is a significant challenge in the Global Navigation Satellite System (GNSS), especially when receiving non-line-of-sight (NLOS) signals. However, selecting line-of-sight (LOS) satellites correctly is still a difficult task in dense urban areas, even with the latest GNSS receivers. This study demonstrates a new method of utilization of C/N0 of the GNSS to detect NLOS signals. The elevation-dependent threshold of the C/N0 setting may be effective in mitigating multipath errors. However, the C/N0 fluctuation affected by NLOS signals is quite large. If the C/N0 is over the threshold, the satellite is used for positioning even if it is still affected by the NLOS signal, which causes the positioning error to jump easily. To overcome this issue, we focused on the value of continuous time-series C/N0 for a certain period. If the C/N0 of the satellite was less than the determined threshold, the satellite was not used for positioning for a certain period, even if the C/N0 recovered over the threshold. Three static tests were conducted at challenging locations near high-rise buildings in Tokyo. The results proved that our method could substantially mitigate multipath errors in differential GNSS by appropriately removing the NLOS signals. Therefore, the performance of real-time kinematic GNSS was significantly improved.


2018 ◽  
Vol 24 (4) ◽  
pp. 470-484
Author(s):  
Alfonso Tierra ◽  
Rubén León ◽  
Alexis Tinoco-S ◽  
Carolina Cañizares ◽  
Marco Amores ◽  
...  

Abstract The time series content information about the dynamic behavior of the system under study. This behavior could be complex, irregular and no lineal. For this reason, it is necessary to study new models that can solve this dynamic more satisfactorily. In this work a visual analysis of recurrence from time series of the coordinate’s variation ENU (East, North, Up) will be made. This analysis was obtained from nine continuous monitoring stations GPS (Global Navigation Satellite System); the intention is to study their behavior, they belong to the Equatorian GPS Network that materializes the reference system SIRGAS - ECUADOR. The presence of noise in the observations was reduced using digital low pass filters with Finite Impulse Response (FIR). For these series, the time delay was determined using the average mutual information, and for the minimum embedding dimension the False Nearest Neighbours (FNN) method was used; the purpose is to obtain the recurrent maps of each coordinates. The results of visual analysis show a strong tendency, especially in the East and North coordinates, while the Up coordinates indicate discontinued, symmetric and periodic behavior.


2020 ◽  
Vol 91 (4) ◽  
pp. 2108-2123 ◽  
Author(s):  
Benjamin A. Brooks ◽  
Jessica Murray ◽  
Jerry Svarc ◽  
Eleyne Phillips ◽  
Ryan Turner ◽  
...  

Abstract The U.S. Geological Survey’s geodetic response to the 4–5 July 2019 (Pacific time) Ridgecrest earthquake sequence comprised primarily the installation and/or reoccupation of Global Navigation Satellite System (GNSS) monumentation. Our response focused primarily on the United States’ Navy’s China Lake Naval Air Weapons Station base (NAWSCL). This focus was because much of the surface rupture occurred on the NAWSCL and because of NAWSCL access restrictions only permitting Federal and State of California personnel. In total, we measured or are still measuring at 24 sites, 14 of which were on the NAWSCL and, as of this writing, operational. The majority of sites were set up as continuous stations logging at either 1 sample per second or 1 sample per 15 s. Two stations were recording a 200 m cross-rupture aperture starting ∼10  hr after the M 6.4 event, and they recorded the coseismic displacements of the M 7.1. Approximately, 1 hr after the M 7.1 event, two new stations were recording a ∼200  m cross-rupture aperture of the surface rupture. In the days following, we established the rest of the stations ranging to a distance of ∼15  km from the M 7.1 principal rupture trace. The lack of differential displacement across the M 6.4 rupture during the M 7.1 event suggests that it did not reactivate the M 6.4 plane. The lack of differential cross-fault displacement for both events suggests that rapid shallow afterslip did not occur at those two locations. The postseismic time series from these stations shows centimeters of horizontal displacement over periods of a few months. They record a mixture of fault-parallel and fault-normal displacements that, in conjunction with analysis of more spatially complete Interferometric Synthetic Aperture Radar displacement fields, suggest that both poroelastic and afterslip phenomena occur along the M 6.4 and 7.1 rupture planes. Using preliminary data from these and other regional stations, we also explore the Ridgecrest sequence’s effect on regional GNSS time series and the differentiation of long-term postseismic motions and secular deformation rates. We find that redefining a common-mode noise filter using different GNSS stations that are assumed to be unaffected by the earthquakes results in small but systematic differences in the regional velocity field estimate.


2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Leonie Bernet ◽  
Elmar Brockmann ◽  
Thomas von Clarmann ◽  
Niklaus Kämpfer ◽  
Emmanuel Mahieu ◽  
...  

<div> <div>Water vapour in the atmosphere is not only a strong greenhouse gas, but also affects many atmospheric processes such as the formation of clouds and precipitation. With increasing temperature, Integrated Water Vapour (IWV) is expected to increase. Analysing how atmospheric water vapour changes in time is therefore important to monitor ongoing climate change. To determine whether IWV increases in Switzerland as expected, we asses IWV trends from a tropospheric water radiometer (TROWARA) in Bern, from a Fourier transform infrared (FTIR) spectrometer at Jungfraujoch and from the Swiss network of ground-based Global Navigation Satellite System (GNSS) stations. In addition, trends are assessed from reanalysis data, using the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts (ECMWF) reanalysis (ERA5) and the Modern-Era Retrospecitve Analysis for Research and Applications (MERRA-2).</div> <div>Ground-based GNSS data are well suited for IWV trends due to their high temporal resolution and the spatially dense networks. However, they are highly sensitvie to instrumental changes and care has to be taken when determining GNSS based trends. We therefore use a straightforward trend method to account for jumps in the GNSS data when instrumental changes were performed.</div> <div>Our data show mostly positive IWV trends between 2 and 5% per decade in Switzerland. GNSS trends are significant for some stations and the significance has the tendency to increase with altitude. Further, we found that IWV scales on average to lower tropospheric temperatures as expected, except in winter. However, the correlation between IWV and temperature based on reanalysis data is spatially incoherent. Besides our positive IWV trends, we found a good agreement of radiometer, GNSS and reanalysis data in Bern. Further, we found a dry bias of the FTIR compared to GNSS data at Jungfraujoch, due to the restriction of FTIR to clear-sky conditions. Our results are generally consistent with the positive water vapour feedback in a warming climate. We show that ground-based GNSS networks provide a valuable source for regional climate monitoring with high spatial and temporal resolution, but homogeneously reprocessed data and advanced trend techniques are needed to account for data jumps.</div> </div>


2017 ◽  
Vol 10 (9) ◽  
pp. 3117-3132 ◽  
Author(s):  
Fadwa Alshawaf ◽  
Kyriakos Balidakis ◽  
Galina Dick ◽  
Stefan Heise ◽  
Jens Wickert

Abstract. Ground-based GNSS (Global Navigation Satellite System) has efficiently been used since the 1990s as a meteorological observing system. Recently scientists have used GNSS time series of precipitable water vapor (PWV) for climate research. In this work, we compare the temporal trends estimated from GNSS time series with those estimated from European Center for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts (ECMWF) reanalysis (ERA-Interim) data and meteorological measurements. We aim to evaluate climate evolution in Germany by monitoring different atmospheric variables such as temperature and PWV. PWV time series were obtained by three methods: (1) estimated from ground-based GNSS observations using the method of precise point positioning, (2) inferred from ERA-Interim reanalysis data, and (3) determined based on daily in situ measurements of temperature and relative humidity. The other relevant atmospheric parameters are available from surface measurements of meteorological stations or derived from ERA-Interim. The trends are estimated using two methods: the first applies least squares to deseasonalized time series and the second uses the Theil–Sen estimator. The trends estimated at 113 GNSS sites, with 10 to 19 years temporal coverage, vary between −1.5 and 2.3 mm decade−1 with standard deviations below 0.25 mm decade−1. These results were validated by estimating the trends from ERA-Interim data over the same time windows, which show similar values. These values of the trend depend on the length and the variations of the time series. Therefore, to give a mean value of the PWV trend over Germany, we estimated the trends using ERA-Interim spanning from 1991 to 2016 (26 years) at 227 synoptic stations over Germany. The ERA-Interim data show positive PWV trends of 0.33 ± 0.06 mm decade−1 with standard errors below 0.03 mm decade−1. The increment in PWV varies between 4.5 and 6.5 % per degree Celsius rise in temperature, which is comparable to the theoretical rate of the Clausius–Clapeyron equation.


2020 ◽  
Vol 12 (6) ◽  
pp. 992 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kunpu Ji ◽  
Yunzhong Shen ◽  
Fengwei Wang

The daily position time series derived by Global Navigation Satellite System (GNSS) contain nonlinear signals which are suitably extracted by using wavelet analysis. Considering formal errors are also provided in daily GNSS solutions, a weighted wavelet analysis is proposed in this contribution where the weight factors are constructed via the formal errors. The proposed approach is applied to process the position time series of 27 permanent stations from the Crustal Movement Observation Network of China (CMONOC), compared to traditional wavelet analysis. The results show that the proposed approach can extract more exact signals than traditional wavelet analysis, with the average error reductions are 13.24%, 13.53% and 9.35% in north, east and up coordinate components, respectively. The results from 500 simulations indicate that the signals extracted by proposed approach are closer to true signals than the traditional wavelet analysis.


Ocean Science ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 14 (2) ◽  
pp. 187-204 ◽  
Author(s):  
Marcel Kleinherenbrink ◽  
Riccardo Riva ◽  
Thomas Frederikse

Abstract. Tide gauge (TG) records are affected by vertical land motion (VLM), causing them to observe relative instead of geocentric sea level. VLM can be estimated from global navigation satellite system (GNSS) time series, but only a few TGs are equipped with a GNSS receiver. Hence, (multiple) neighboring GNSS stations can be used to estimate VLM at the TG. This study compares eight approaches to estimate VLM trends at 570 TG stations using GNSS by taking into account all GNSS trends with an uncertainty smaller than 1 mm yr−1 within 50 km. The range between the methods is comparable with the formal uncertainties of the GNSS trends. Taking the median of the surrounding GNSS trends shows the best agreement with differenced altimetry–tide gauge (ALT–TG) trends. An attempt is also made to improve VLM trends from ALT–TG time series. Only using highly correlated along-track altimetry and TG time series reduces the SD of ALT–TG time series by up to 10 %. As a result, there are spatially coherent changes in the trends, but the reduction in the root mean square (RMS) of differences between ALT–TG and GNSS trends is insignificant. However, setting correlation thresholds also acts like a filter to remove problematic TG time series. This results in sets of ALT–TG VLM trends at 344–663 TG locations, depending on the correlation threshold. Compared to other studies, we decrease the RMS of differences between GNSS and ALT–TG trends (from 1.47 to 1.22 mm yr−1), while we increase the number of locations (from 109 to 155), Depending on the methods the mean of differences between ALT–TG and GNSS trends vary between 0.1 and 0.2 mm yr−1. We reduce the mean of the differences by taking into account the effect of elastic deformation due to present-day mass redistribution. At varying ALT–TG correlation thresholds, we provide new sets of trends for 759 to 939 different TG stations. If both GNSS and ALT–TG trend estimates are available, we recommend using the GNSS trend estimates because residual ocean signals might correlate over long distances. However, if large discrepancies ( > 3 mm yr−1) between the two methods are present, local VLM differences between the TG and the GNSS station are likely the culprit and therefore it is better to take the ALT–TG trend estimate. GNSS estimates for which only a single GNSS station and no ALT–TG estimate are available might still require some inspection before they are used in sea level studies.


Sensors ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 21 (3) ◽  
pp. 774
Author(s):  
Osman Orhan ◽  
Talib Oliver-Cabrera ◽  
Shimon Wdowinski ◽  
Sefa Yalvac ◽  
Murat Yakar

The Karapinar basin, located in the Central Anatolian part of Turkey, is subjected to land subsidence and sinkhole activity due to extensive groundwater withdrawal that began in the early 2000s. In this study, we use Interferometric Synthetic Aperture Radar (InSAR), Global Navigation Satellite System (GNSS), and groundwater level data to monitor and better understand the relations between groundwater extraction, land subsidence, and sinkhole formation in the Karapinar basin. The main observations used in the study are InSAR-derived subsidence velocity maps calculated from both Sentinel-1 (2014–2018) and COSMO-SkyMed (2016–2017) SAR data. Our analysis reveals broad areas of subsidence with rates exceeding 70 mm/yr. The InSAR-derived subsidence was compared with GNSS data acquired by a continuously operating GNSS station located in the study area, which show a similar rate of subsidence. The temporal characteristic of both InSAR and GNSS time series indicate a long-term subsidence signal superimposed by seasonal variability, which follows the overall groundwater level changes, with over 80% cross-correlation consistency. Our results also indicate that sinkhole activity is limited to slow subsidence areas, reflecting strong cohesion of near-surface rock layers that resist subsidence but yield to collapse in response to aquifer system deformation induced by groundwater extraction.


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