Strategies for spatial and temporal extrapolation and interpolation of wet delay

. The excess radio-path delay due to the atmospheric water vapor, the wet delay, can be derived from water vapor radiometer (WVR) measurements. WVR data used for external calibration of space geodetic measurements are not always acquired in the directions of the space geodetic signal sources, thus extrapolation and interpolation methods for the wet delay are needed. We evaluate three different methods using approximately 10 days of WVR measurements. Two methods, the gradient method and turbulence method, use the directional information in the data, while the third method used is linear regression in time regardless of the direction of the observations. The turbulence method yielded at least 10% less RMS estimation error than the errors from the other two methods. Received: 20 May 1997 / Accepted: 15 December 1997