A New Method for converting Slant Ionospheric Delays to Vertical for SBAS Ionospheric corrections

¹ School of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering and the SNU-IAMD, Seoul National University, Seoul, South Korea
² School of Computing, KAIST, Daejeon, South Korea

^* Corresponding author: kee@snu.ac.kr

Abstract

SBAS gives ionospheric correction data to GNSS users for more accurate positioning. SBAS uses obliquity factor of thin shell model to convert slant ionospheric delays to vertical delays which is not precise especially at lower elevation angle. This paper suggests a new method for estimating the vertical delays which are needed for generating the ionospheric corrections. The new method uses Chapman profile assumption by which the vertical electron density distribution can be modeled. It is also assumed that Chapman profile’s parameters are given and the vertical ionospheric delay can be linearly modeled. We divided ionosphere into multi-layer and mapped ionospheric vertical delays with a linear function. Converting vertical delays of each layer to slant delays, we can set a linear equation for the vertical ionospheric delay at IPP. We used IRI model to get information about ionosphere for simulation to verify our new method. Estimation error of vertical ionospheric delay at IPP was decreased about 40% in average when using our new method.