Impact of atmospheric turbulence on geodetic very longbaseline interferometry

摘要

We assess the impact of atmospheric turbulence on geodetic very long baselineinterferometry (VLBI) through simulations of atmospheric delays. VLBI observations aresimulated for the two best existing VLBI data sets: The continuous VLBI campaignsCONTO5 and CONT08. We test different methods to determine the magnitude of theturbulence above each VLBI station, i.e., the refractive index structure constantTheresults from the analysis of the simulated data and the actually observed VLBI data arecompared. We find that atmospheric turbulence today is the largest error source forgeodetic VLBI. Accurate modeling of atmospheric turbulence is necessary to reach thehighest accuracy with geodetic VLBI.