Fast and accurate ray‐tracing algorithms for real‐time space geodetic applications using numerical weather models

The atmospheric excess path delay is a major contributor to the error budget of space geodetic positioning applications and should therefore be reduced to the maximum possible extent. Numerical weather models are undergoing improvements with regard to their spatial resolution, which enables the compensation of troposphere propagation errors by applying corrections obtained from ray‐tracing through three‐dimensional meteorologic fields. Since in the selection of the locations of the grid points priority is given to the requirements of meteorologists rather than the facilitation of efficient ray‐tracing algorithms, we propose a method that can resample and refine the large data cubes onto regular grids using a sophisticated and fast method developed at the National Institute of Information and Communications Technology (NICT). Once these data sets are generated, ray‐tracing algorithms can be applied in order to compute atmospheric excess path delays in real time for several users using off‐the‐shelf PCs. We present three different ray‐tracing strategies and discuss their advantages and bottlenecks with regard to accuracy and data throughput.