This project was a NERC-funded PhD studentship led by Nigel Penna (University of Newcastle).

It investigates the potential for estimating tropospheric delay from Global Navigation Satellite Systems (GNSS) stations on moving platforms experiencing a change in altitude. The ability to accurately estimate tropospheric delay in kinematic GNSS positioning has implications for improved height accuracy due to the mitigation of a major GNSS error source, and for the collection of atmospheric water vapour data for meteorology and climate studies. The potential for extending current kinematic GNSS positioning estimates of tropospheric delay from sea level based studies to airborne experiments, and the achievable height accuracy from a range of tropospheric mitigation strategies used in airborne GNSS positioning, were explored.

An experiment was established at the Snowdon Mountain Railway (SMR), utilising the railway to collect a repeatable kinematic dataset, profiling 950 m of the lower atmosphere over a 50 day period during 2011. GNSS stations on stable platforms and meteorological sensors were installed at the extremities of the trajectory, allowing reference tropospheric delays and coordinates to be established. The retrieval of zenith wet delay (ZWD) from kinematic GNSS solutions using tropospheric estimation strategies was validated against an interpolated reference ZWD between GNSS stations on stable platforms.

The interested scientist can read about the project / data set in S.R. Webb (2015) "Kinematic GNSS tropospheric estimation and mitigation over a range of altitudes", PhD thesis, Newcastle University, February 2015.