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The delays of radio signals transmitted by global navigation satellite system (GNSS) satellites and induced by neutral atmosphere, which are usually represented by zenith tropospheric delay (ZTD), are required as critical information both for GNSS positioning and navigation and GNSS meteorology. Establishing a stable and reliable ZTD model is one of the interests in GNSS research. In this study, we proposed a regional ZTD model that makes full use of the ZTD calculated from regional GNSS data and the corresponding ZTD estimated by global pressure and temperature 3 (GPT3) model, adopting the artificial neutral network (ANN) to construct the correlation between ZTD derived from GPT3 and GNSS observations. The experiments in Hong Kong using Satellite Positioning Reference Station Network (SatRet) were conducted and three statistical values, i.e., bias, root mean square error (RMSE), and compound relative error (CRE) were adopted for our comparisons. Numerical results showed that the proposed model outperformed the parameter ZTD model (Saastamoinen model) and the empirical ZTD model (GPT3 model), with an approximately 56%/52% and 52%/37% RMSE improvement in the internal and external accuracy verification, respectively. Moreover, the proposed method effectively improved the systematic deviation of GPT3 model and achieved better ZTD estimation in both rainy and rainless conditions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Global navigation satellite system (GNSS) tomography can effectively sense the three-dimensional structure of tropospheric water vapor (WV) using the GNSS observations. Numerous studies have utilized a tomographic window to include more epochs of observations, which significantly increases the number of valid signals. However, considering the tomography grid limits, a massive number of valid signals inevitably exhibits linear dependence. This dependence makes it impossible to improve the rank score of the tomography coefficient matrix by blindly introducing a large number of valid rays. Furthermore, excessive valid signals may lead to a high condition number in the coefficient matrix (ill-condition problem), which causes unstable results using the GNSS-WV tomography. Considering these problems, we proposed an improved tomographic approach, which applies a refined tomographic window. It differs from the general tomographic window in that the window is refined to traverse the valid signals available 15 min before and after the target epoch while retaining only the linearly independent parts (characteristic signal). Compared to the conventional method, the proposed method can filter the characteristic signal, which increases the rank score of the coefficient matrix and improves the stability of the tomography model. In this paper, we used GNSS observations from the Hong Kong Satellite Positioning Reference Station Network (SatRef) to validate the performance of the proposed method over the day-of-year (DOY) periods of 130–132, 2019 and 146–148, 2019. The numerical results showed that, by using a refined tomographic window, the proposed method obtained superior WV products in comparison with that of the conventional method. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]