Wide-area ionospheric delay model for GNSS users in middle- and low-magnetic-latitude regions

A useful ionospheric delay model to compensate for the effect of ionospheric error on GNSS service over continent-wide areas or oceans is the Satellite-Based Augmentation System’s wide-area thin-shell planar fit ionospheric grid model. In order to implement a proper wide-area ionospheric delay model in the Asia-Pacific region to reflect the variation introduced by local ionospheric activity, the present study develops a proper ionospheric delay model to correct ionospheric error in middle- and low-magnetic-latitude regions. Specifically, the proposed ionospheric delay model uses several dual-frequency GNSS reference stations distributed in Taiwan, South Korea, Japan, and China as grid points in place of the conventional grid points generated by ionospheric pierce points. The ionospheric delays observed at the reference stations are processed and provided to the user, who can then construct the ionospheric delay model using weighted least squares with the distances between the user and the stations as weights. This proposed ionospheric delay model lowers the computation load by eliminating the conversion of delays at the ionospheric pierce points to those at the grid points and provides good descriptions of dynamic variations due to the ionospheric activities. Also, a simplified model is developed to further reduce its computation load while providing almost the same service as that of the original proposed model. A selection mechanism between the original proposed model and its simplified version is developed as well. The details of the proposed ionospheric delay model are explained, and experiments conducted using data collected from the reference stations in the Asia-Pacific region are presented. The effectiveness of the proposed model is validated by comparison with the conventional wide-area thin-shell planar fit ionospheric grid model provided by the Japanese Multi-functional Satellite Augmentation System under both nominal and disturbed ionospheric conditions.