Atmospheric turbulence theory applied to GPS carrier-phase data

Turbulent irregularities in the lower atmosphere cause physical correlations between Global Positioning System (GPS) carrier-phase measurements. Based on turbulence theory, a variance–covariance model is developed in this paper that reflects these correlations. The main result shows that the obtained fully-populated variance–covariance matrices depend not only on the satellite-station geometry, but also on the prevailing atmospheric conditions, which are parameterised by, e.g., the von Karman spectrum of refractivity fluctuations and the wind velocity vector. It is shown that the amount of the correlation between two GPS carrier-phase observations is inversely related to the separation distance of the corresponding ray paths through the turbulent atmosphere. Furthermore, the wind velocity and direction play a key role in the correlation.