Carrier phase-based ionosphere recovery over a regional area GPS network.

摘要

A new approach of ionosphere recovery has been developed and described in this thesis using a regional area GPS network. The approach focuses on recovering ionosphere vertical TEC at centimetre accuracy using carrier phase as the principal observable. To eliminate possible satellite and receiver dependent biases, a double difference method has been employed from which the absolute ionosphere estimates are determined. A grid model has been developed along with a streamlined Kalman filter to model and estimate the vertical ionosphere TEC over the network. The performance of the proposed ionosphere recovery method has been tested using data from a regional GPS network currently in operation. The testing results have indicated that the regional ionosphere estimates are at the accuracy of several centimetres. A software package was developed to implement the proposed methodology.