Remote sensing precipitable water with GPS

The principle and method of remote sensing precipitable water (PW) by the Global Positioning System (GPS) are introduced. A series of tropospheric delay have been obtained from the dual frequency receiver's data of global tracking stations in East Asia and precise satellite ephemeris of IGS from July 31 to August 20, 1997. The continuous PW at the interval of 30 min have been estimated at Shanghai and Wuhan GPS sites. The results are compared with PW from conventional radiosonde during the same period, and the RMS is about 0.50 cm.