ESTIMATING NEAR REAL TIME PRECIPITABLE WATER FROM SHORT BASELINE GPS OBSERVATIONS

Water vapor in the atmosphere is an influential factor of the hydrosphere cycle, which exchanges heat through phase change and is essential to precipitation. Because of its significance in altering weather, the estimation of water vapor amount and distribution is crucial to determine the precision of the weather forecasting and the understanding of regional/local climate. It is shown that it is reliable to measure precipitable water (PW) using long baseline (500-2000km) GPS observations. However, it becomes infeasible to derive absolute PW from GPS observations in Taiwan due to geometric limitation of relatively short-baseline network. In this study, a method of deriving Near-Real-Time PW from short baseline GPS observations is proposed. This method uses a reference station to derive a regression model for wet delay, and to interpolate the difference of wet delay among stations. Then, the precipitable water is obtained by using a conversion factor derived from radiosondes. The method has been tested by using the reference station located on Mt. Ho-Hwan with eleven stations around Taiwan. The result indicates that short baseline GPS observations can be used to precisely estimate the precipitable water in near-real-time.