Global morphology of ionospheric F-layer scintillations using FS3/COSMIC GPS radio occultation data

We report on the FormoSat-3/Constellation Observing System for Meteorology, Ionosphere and Climate (FS3/COSMIC) limb-viewing observations of GPS L-band scintillations since mid-2006 and propose to study global F-layer irregularity morphology. The FS3/COSMIC has generally performed more than 1000 ionospheric radio occultation (RO) observations per day. We reprocess 1-Hz amplitude data and obtain complete limb-viewing profiles of the undersampling (sampling frequency lower than Fresnel frequency) S4 scintillation index from about 80% of the RO observations. There are a few percent of FS3/COSMIC RO observations having greater than 0.09 undersampling S4max values on average. However, seven identified areas, Central Pacific Area (?20° to 20° dip latitude, 160°E–130°W), South American Area (?20° to 20° dip latitude, 100°W–30°W), African Area (?20° to 20° dip latitude, 30°W–50°E), European Area (30°–55°N, 0°–55°E), Japan Sea Area (35°–55°N, 120°–150°E), Arctic Area (>65° dip latitude), and Antarctic Area (<?65° dip latitude), have been designated to have a much higher percentage of strong limb-viewing L-band scintillations. During the years in most of the last sunspot cycle from mid-2006 to the end 2014, the scintillation climatology, namely, its variations with each identified area, season, local time, magnetic activity, and solar activity, have been documented.     

GLONASS pseudorange inter-channel biases considerations when jointly estimating GPS and GLONASS clock offset

GLONASS clock offset estimation is affected by the inter-channel biases (ICBs) caused by frequency division multiple access technique. The effect of ICBs on joint GPS/GLONASS clock offset estimation is analyzed. An efficient approach for joint estimation of GPS/GLONASS satellite clock offset is applied to the generation of 30-s clock offset products. During the estimation, the following three ICB handling strategies were tested: calculating ICBs for each GLONASS signal channel, calculating ICBs for each GLONASS satellite and neglecting ICBs. The behavior of ICBs under different strategies was statistically stable. Subsequently, the clock offset products using different ICB strategies were evaluated. The evaluation shows that consideration of the ICB is important when estimating the clock offset. Furthermore, estimating one ICB for each GLONASS satellite is better than estimating one for each GLONASS signal channel because, with the former strategy, the clock offset products behave more smoothly and have higher accuracy compared with products from the International GNSS Service Analysis Center. In addition, precise point positioning, using clock offsets based on one ICB for each GLONASS satellite, has the highest positioning accuracy.     

Global ionosphere map constructed by using total electron content from ground-based GNSS receiver and FORMOSAT-3/COSMIC GPS occultation experiment

Effects of rapidly changing ionospheric weather are critical in high accuracy positioning, navigation, and communication applications. A system used to construct the global total electron content (TEC) distribution for monitoring the ionospheric weather in near-real time is needed in the modern society. Here we build the TEC map named Taiwan Ionosphere Group for Education and Research (TIGER) Global Ionospheric Map (GIM) from observations of ground-based GNSS receivers and space-based FORMOSAT-3/COSMIC (F3/C) GPS radio occultation observations using the spherical harmonic expansion and Kalman filter update formula. The TIGER GIM (TGIM) will be published in near-real time of 4-h delay with a spatial resolution of 2.5° in latitude and 5° in longitude and a high temporal resolution of every 5 min. The F3/C TEC results in an improvement on the GIM of about 15.5%, especially over the ocean areas. The TGIM highly correlates with the GIMs published by other international organizations. Therefore, the routinely published TGIM in near-real time is not only for communication, positioning, and navigation applications but also for monitoring and scientific study of ionospheric weathers, such as magnetic storms and seismo-ionospheric anomalies.     

Assessment of PPP integer ambiguity resolution using GPS,GLONASS and BeiDou (IGSO,MEO) constellations

Although integer ambiguity resolution (IAR) can improve positioning accuracy considerably and shorten the convergence time of precise point positioning (PPP), it requires an initialization time of over 30 min. With the full operation of GLONASS globally and BDS in the Asia–Pacific region, it is necessary to assess the PPP–IAR performance by simultaneous fixing of GPS, GLONASS, and BDS ambiguities. This study proposed a GPS + GLONASS + BDS combined PPP–IAR strategy and processed PPP–IAR kinematically and statically using one week of data collected at 20 static stations. The undifferenced wide- and narrow-lane fractional cycle biases for GPS, GLONASS, and BDS were estimated using a regional network, and undifferenced PPP ambiguity resolution was performed to assess the contribution of multi-GNSSs. Generally, over 99% of a posteriori residuals of wide-lane ambiguities were within ±0.25 cycles for both GPS and BDS, while the value was 91.5% for GLONASS. Over 96% of narrow-lane residuals were within ±0.15 cycles for GPS, GLONASS, and BDS. For kinematic PPP with a 10-min observation time, only 16.2% of all cases could be fixed with GPS alone. However, adding GLONASS improved the percentage considerably to 75.9%, and it reached 90.0% when using GPS + GLONASS + BDS. Not all epochs could be fixed with a correct set of ambiguities; therefore, we defined the ratio of the number of epochs with correctly fixed ambiguities to the number of all fixed epochs as the correct fixing rate (CFR). Because partial ambiguity fixing was used, when more than five ambiguities were fixed correctly, we considered the epoch correctly fixed. For the small ratio criteria of 2.0, the CFR improved considerably from 51.7% for GPS alone, to 98.3% when using GPS + GLONASS + BDS combined solutions.     

Multi‐scale approach to mining significant spatial co‐location patterns

Spatial co‐location pattern mining aims to discover a collection of Boolean spatial features, which are frequently located in close geographic proximity to each other. Existing methods for identifying spatial co‐location patterns usually require users to specify two thresholds, i.e. the prevalence threshold for measuring the prevalence of candidate co‐location patterns and distance threshold to search the spatial co‐location patterns. However, these two thresholds are difficult to determine in practice, and improper thresholds may lead to the misidentification of useful patterns and the incorrect reporting of meaningless patterns. The multi‐scale approach proposed in this study overcomes this limitation. Initially, the prevalence of candidate co‐location patterns is measured statistically by using a significance test, and a non‐parametric model is developed to construct the null distribution of features with the consideration of spatial auto‐correlation. Next, the spatial co‐location patterns are explored at multi‐scales instead of single scale (or distance threshold) discovery. The validity of the co‐location patterns is evaluated based on the concept of lifetime. Experiments on both synthetic and ecological datasets show that spatial co‐location patterns are discovered correctly and completely by using the proposed method; on the other hand, the subjectivity in discovery of spatial co‐location patterns is reduced significantly.     

A Target Detection Method for Hyperspectral Imagery Based on Two-Time Detection

To solve the low detection efficiency problem of Constrained Energy Minimization (CEM) method used for hyperspectral remote sensing imagery, this paper firstly presents two improved detection methods: principal component CEM (PCCEM) and matrix taper CEM (MTCEM). Then, based on these two methods, a more optimized Two-Time detection (TTD) method is proposed. Primarily, the targets of interest in the hyperspectral image are detected by using the PCCEM and MTCEM method. Then the autocorrelation matrix of non-target pixels is estimated according to the target detection results. Finally, based on this autocorrelation matrix, a new weight vector is constructed for the second detection. Under the effect of this new weight vector, the output energy of the target can be kept at unity and the output energy of the background is suppressed at the same time. Then, the improvement of target detection result can be realized. Experimental results on a real world hyperspectral data show the efficiency of the proposed TTD method to improve the detection performance.     

SVLBI用于大地测量的卫星轨道及其跟踪网设计

SVLBI （space very long baseline interferometry） has some important potential applications in geodesy and geodynamics, for which one of the most difficult tasks is to precisely determine the orbit of an SVLBI satellite. This work studies several technologies that will possibly be able to determine the orbit of a space VLBI satellite. Then, according to the types and charac- teristics of the satellite and the requirements for geodetic study and the geometry of the GNSS （GPS, GALILEO） satellite to track the space VLBI satellite, the six Keplerian elements of the SVLBI satellite （TEST-SVLBI） are determined. A program is designed to analyze the coverage area of space of different altitudes by the stations of the network, with which the tracking network of TEST-SVLBI is designed. The efficiency of tracking TEST-SVLBI by the network is studied, and the results are presented.     

Algorithm for Harmonic Tidal Analysis along T/P Tracks： Taking Differences of Observed Sea Surface Heights at Adjacent Points as Observations

An algorithm （differential mode） is presented for the improvement of harmonic tidal analysis along T/P tracks, in which the differences between the observed sea surface heights at adjacent points are taken as observations. Also, the observation equations are constrained with the results of the crossover analysis; the parameter estimations are performed at 0.1° latitude intervals by the least squares. Cycle 10 to 330 T/P altimeter data covering the China Sea and the Northwest Pacific Ocean （2°-50° N,105°-150° E） are adopted for a refined along-track harmonic tidal analysis, and harmonic constants of 12 constituents in 8 474 points are obtained, which indicates that the algorithm can efficiently remove non-tidal effects in the altimeter observations, and improve the precision of tide parameters. Moreover, parameters along altimetry tracks represent a smoother distribution than those obtained by traditional algorithms. The root mean squares of the fitting errors between the tidal height model and the observations reduce from 11 cm to 1.3 cm.     

南极国际GPS跟踪站的海潮位移改正

This paper describes the ocean loading tides corrections of GPS stations in Antarctica, such as the Great Wall station and Zhongshan station. Based on the theory of ocean loading tides, the displacement corrections of ocean loading tides on GPS stations in Antarctica are calculated by using the CRS4.0 ocean loading tides model. These corrections are also applied to GPS data processing. The GPS data are analyzed by the GAMIT software with and without these corrections. We compared and analyzed the GPS baseline components to get the differences. The results show that the ocean tidal displacement corrections have obvious effects upon GPS baseline components. Therefore, we should not ignore the ocean loading tides corrections of GPS stations in Antarctica to obtain precise and reliable results.     

矢量数据动态存贮方法的研究

本文通过对三种矢量数据动态存贮方法的分析比较，并通过实践，找到一种安全可靠并且比较实用的数据动态存贮方式。