Towards tropospheric delay estimation using GNSS smartphone receiver network

Information on the water vapor distribution of the troposphere is useful for weather monitoring and forecast. Water vapor distribution can be estimated from tropospheric delays produced by high-grade Global Navigation Satellite System (GNSS) receivers. This type of techniques is currently used in the data assimilation process of Numerical Weather Prediction (NWP) models, especially, for the limited areas covered by these high-grade GNSS networks. We consider a new collaborative crowdsourcing-based alternative for obtaining these GNSS meteorology measurements. It relies on a GNSS smartphone receiver network, and hence promises to expand the use of GNSS meteorology techniques into areas not covered by high-end receiver networks. In order to assess the feasibility of estimating the troposphere water vapor distribution using such receiver networks, it is proposed a system architecture that supports the troposphere water vapor distribution estimation using a smartphone network. Next, it is presented the simulator test-bed that has been developed to emulate the proposed system in a representative way and to assess the system performances. The main motivation behind the simulator is that it provides a controlled environment for testing our method.