Integrated water vapour from GPS

Abstract

Water vapour is highly variable in space and time, and plays a large role in atmospheric processes that act over a wide range of temporal and spatial scales on global climate to micrometeorology. This paper deals with a new approach to remotely sense the water vapour based on the Global Position System (GPS). The signal propagating from GPS satellites to ground based receivers is delayed by atmospheric water vapour. The delay is parameterized in terms of time varying Zenith-Wet Delay (ZWD), which is retrieved by stochastic filtering of GPS data. With the help of surface pressure and temperature readings at the GPS receiver, the retrieved ZWD can be transformed into Integrated Water Vapour (IWV) overlying at the receiver with little additional uncertainties. In this study the Zenith Total time Delay (ZTD) data without met package is retrieved using the GAMIT (King and Bock, 1997) GPS data processing software developed by Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) for the period of January 2003 to February 2003 for two stations New Delhi and Bangalore .The IWV retrieved from GPS and its comparison with Limited Area Model (LAM) retrieved IWV shows fairly good agreement.