Assessing the Status of GNSS Data Processing Systems to Estimate Integrated Water Vapour for Use in Numerical Weather Prediction models

Modern Numerical Weather Prediction (NWP) models make use of the GNSS derived Zenith Total Delay (ZTD) or Integrated Water Vapour (IWV) estimates to enhance the quality of their forecasts. Usually, the ZTD is assimilated into the NWP models on hourly intervals but with the advancement of NWP models towards higher update rates, it has become necessary to estimate the ZTD on sub-hourly intervals. In turn, this imposes requirements related to the timeliness and accuracy of the ZTD estimates and has lead to a development of various strategies to process GNSS observations to obtain ZTD with different latencies and accuracies. Using present GNSS products and tools, ZTD can be estimated in real-time (RT), near real-time (NRT) and post-processing (PP) modes. The aim of this study is to provide an overview and accuracy assessment of various RT, NRT, and PP IWV estimation systems and comparing their achieved accuracy with the user requirements for GNSS meteorology. The NRT and PP systems are based on the Bernese GNSS Software v5.2 using a double-difference network and Precise Point Positioning (PPP) strategy, and the RT systems are based on BKG Ntrip Client 2.7 and PPP-Wizard both using PPP. One of the RT systems allows integer ambiguity resolution with PPP and therefore the effect of fixing integer ambiguities on ZTD estimates will also be presented.