GFZ German research centre for geo sciences

GNSS Product Combination

The International GNSS Service (IGS) provides highly accurate satellite orbits and clocks for GPS and GLONASS to the global user community. These products are based on the combination of individual solutions provided by various analysis centers. The – so far not available - combination of all satellite navigation systems such as Galileo, BeiDou and Galileo, BeiDou and QZSS requires consistent weighting, taking into account the system-specific modelling and parameterization. Since 2018, we have been investigating new methods for a joint combination with all available satellite constellations. The previous contributions of the GFZ working group are:      

  • Modification of the IGS legacy combination software for multi-GNSS (Sakic et al., 2018);      
  • testing and evaluation of the legacy combination strategy (Mansur et al., 2020);
  • Development of a new combination procedure in which the weighting of the ACs; constellations with methods of variance component variance component estimation methods (Mansur et al., 2022; Sakic et al, 2022; Mansur et al., 2024 (accepted)) and  
  • the development of a new combination software (Satellite Precise Orbit and Clock Combination - SPOCC)

With our developments, we are making a significant contribution to the MGEX combination task force.

References

  • Sakic, P., Mansur, G., Viegas, E., Männel, B., and Schuh, H.: Towards a Multi-Constellation combination: Improving the IGS orbit & clock combination software for MGEX products, in: IGS Workshop, Wuhan, 2018.
  • Mansur, G., Sakic, P., Männel, B., and Schuh, H.: Multi-constellation GNSS orbit combination based on MGEX products, Advances in Geosciences, 50, 57–64, doi.org/10.5194/adgeo-50-57-2020, 2020.
  • Mansur, G., Sakic, P., Brack, A., Männel, B., & Schuh, H. (2022). Combination of GNSS orbits using least-squares variance component estimation. Journal of Geodesy, 96: 92. doi:10.1007/s00190-022-01685-y.
  • Sakic, P., Mansur, G., Männel, B., Brack, A., & Schuh, H. (2022). An Experimental Combination of IGS repro3 Campaign’s Orbit Products Using a Variance Component Estimation Strategy. In J. T. Freymueller, & L. Sánchez (Eds.), Geodesy for a Sustainable Earth (pp. 15-23). Cham: Springer. doi:10.1007/1345_2022_158.
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