EGU22-8242
https://doi.org/10.5194/egusphere-egu22-8242
EGU General Assembly 2022
© Author(s) 2022. This work is distributed under
the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.

Tropospheric Parameter Estimation with Dual-Frequency GNSS Smartphones

Raphael Stauffer, Roland Hohensinn, Iván Darío Herrera Pinzón, Gregor Möller, and Markus Rothacher
Raphael Stauffer et al.
  • ETH Zurich, Institute of Geodesy & Photogrammetry, Mathematical and Physical Geodesy, Zürich, Switzerland

With the introduction of the operating system Android 7 Nougat in the year 2016, it became possible to access the GNSS code and carrier phase observations on Android smartphones. These observations can now be processed with state-of-the-art GNSS processing software, which allows an in-depth evaluation of the smartphone`s GNSS performance. The availability of the carrier phase observations is an important step towards sub-decimeter-level positioning. Since a few years, there are also smartphones on the market that are equipped with dual-frequency GNSS chipsets.

In this presentation, the capability of dual-frequency GNSS smartphones for the estimation of tropospheric delays is investigated. Static measurements over several weeks are performed using a Google Pixel 4 XL smartphone. The measurements are processed using relative positioning methods in a real-time mode, where a Continuously Operating Reference Station (CORS) acts as a base. The estimated differential tropospheric parameters – derived for short and medium baseline lengths – are then added to the absolute values computed at the reference station by Precise Point Positioning (PPP). Using this method, we demonstrate that the tropospheric zenith total delays can be successfully determined from smartphone observations. When comparing the estimated tropospheric delays with those determined at a nearby geodetic receiver, differences in the range of a few millimeters to centimeters are visible. In view of these accuracies, the suggested method shows the potential to resolve small-scale tropospheric structures and thus, can be an interesting data source for numerical weather prediction models or related GNSS crowdsourcing projects.

How to cite: Stauffer, R., Hohensinn, R., Herrera Pinzón, I. D., Möller, G., and Rothacher, M.: Tropospheric Parameter Estimation with Dual-Frequency GNSS Smartphones, EGU General Assembly 2022, Vienna, Austria, 23–27 May 2022, EGU22-8242, https://doi.org/10.5194/egusphere-egu22-8242, 2022.