Calibration of regional ionospheric delay with uncombined precise point positioning and accuracy assessment

A new method for the calibration of regional ionospheric delay based on uncombined precise point positioning (U-PPP) is proposed in this study. The performance of the new method was comparatively validated in terms of its accuracy and robustness with respect to the phase-smoothed pseudorange (PSP) method through two short-baseline experiments. Accuracy of the PPP-derived ionospheric delays was further assessed by interpolating them to a user station to perform single-frequency simulated kinematic PPP. Two 24-hr period datasets of four continuous operation reference system (CORS) stations were analyzed, collected during calm and disturbed ionospheric conditions, respectively. The single-frequency GPS observables from a user station, that were a-priori corrected by the interpolated ionospheric delays, were utilized to implement single-frequency PPP (SF-PPP). The results show that interpolation accuracy is better than 1 dm and, with the proposed method, is less affected by the ionospheric activity; meanwhile, positioning accuracy of SF-PPP was 4 similar to 5 cm (horizontal) and better than 1 dm (vertical). For comparison, two reference SF-PPP solutions were also obtained, in which the ionospheric delays are eliminated either by forming semi-combination observations or by using global ionosphere maps (GIM) model values; in both cases the positioning accuracy was only 4 similar to 7 dm (horizontal) and 1 m (vertical). These results provide a further demonstration of the performance of PPP-based regional ionospheric calibration in the parameter domain.