title: Improving GLONASS Precise Orbit Determination through Data Connection.
abstract: In order to improve the precision of GLONASS orbits, this paper presents a method to connect the data segments of a single station-satellite pair to increase the observation continuity and, consequently, the strength of the precise orbit determination (POD) solution. In this method, for each GLONASS station-satellite pair, the wide-lane ambiguities derived from the Melbourne-Wübbena combination are statistically tested and corrected for phase integer offsets and then the same is carried out for the narrow-lane ambiguities calculated from the POD solution. An experimental validation was carried out using one-month GNSS data of a global network with 175 IGS stations. The result shows that, on average, 27.1% of the GLONASS station-satellite pairs with multiple data segments could be connected to a single long observation arc and, thus, only one ambiguity parameter was estimated. Using the connected data, the GLONASS orbit overlapping RMS at the day boundaries could be reduced by 19.2% in ideal cases with an averaged reduction of about 6.3%.
authors.affiliation: GNSS Research Center, Wuhan University, 129 Luoyu Road, Wuhan 430079, China. liudaweng@126.com.|German Research Center for Geosciences (GFZ), Telegrafenberg, Potsdam 14473, Germany. liudaweng@126.com.
authors.forename: Yang
authors.initials: Y
authors.lastname: Liu
authors.affiliation: German Research Center for Geosciences (GFZ), Telegrafenberg, Potsdam 14473, Germany. maor@gfz-potsdam.de.
authors.forename: Maorong
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Ge
authors.affiliation: GNSS Research Center, Wuhan University, 129 Luoyu Road, Wuhan 430079, China. shi@whu.edu.cn.
authors.forename: Chuang
authors.initials: C
authors.lastname: Shi
authors.affiliation: GNSS Research Center, Wuhan University, 129 Luoyu Road, Wuhan 430079, China. ydlou@whu.edu.cn.
authors.forename: Yidong
authors.initials: Y
authors.lastname: Lou
authors.affiliation: German Research Center for Geosciences (GFZ), Telegrafenberg, Potsdam 14473, Germany. wickert@gfz-potsdam.de.
authors.forename: Jens
authors.initials: J
authors.lastname: Wickert
authors.affiliation: German Research Center for Geosciences (GFZ), Telegrafenberg, Potsdam 14473, Germany. schuh@gfz-potsdam.de.
authors.forename: Harald
authors.initials: H
authors.lastname: Schuh
keywords: GLONASS; data connection; orbit precision; precise orbit determination