• Journal of the Korean Society of Surveying, Geodesy, Photogrammetry and Cartography
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• v.33 no.4
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• pp.317-324
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• 2015

GNSS was firstly proposed for application in weather forecasting in the mid-1980s. It has continued to demonstrate the practical uses in GNSS meteorology, and other relevant researches are currently being conducted. Precipitable Water Vapor (PWV), calculated based on the GNSS signal delays due to the troposphere of the Earth, represents the amount of the water vapor in the atmosphere, and it is therefore widely used in the analysis of various weather phenomena such as monitoring of weather conditions and climate change detection. In this study we calculated the PWV through the meteorological information from an Automatic Weather Station (AWS) as well as GNSS data processing of a Continuously Operating Reference Station (CORS) in order to analyze the heavy snowfall of the Ulsan area in early 2014. Song’s model was adopted for the weighted mean temperature model (T_m), which is the most important parameter in the calculation of PWV. The study period is a total of 56 days (February 2013 and 2014). The average PWV of February 2014 was determined to be 11.29 mm, which is 11.34% lower than that of the heavy snowfall period. The average PWV of February 2013 was determined to be 10.34 mm, which is 8.41% lower than that of not the heavy snowfall period. In addition, certain meteorological factors obtained from AWS were compared as well, resulting in a very low correlation of 0.29 with the saturated vapor pressure calculated using the empirical formula of Magnus. The behavioral pattern of PWV has a tendency to change depending on the precipitation type, specifically, snow or rain. It was identified that the PWV showed a sudden increase and a subsequent rapid drop about 6.5 hours before precipitation. It can be concluded that the pattern analysis of GNSS PWV is an effective method to analyze the precursor phenomenon of precipitation.