Predicting orbit and clock corrections during their outage in real-time positioning using GPS, GLONASS and QZSS for natural hazard warning systems

Abstract

Real-time Precise Point Positioning (RT PPP) is a primary positioning method used in natural hazard warning systems (NHWS) such as monitoring tsunami and earthquakes. The method relays on precise orbit and clock corrections to eliminate satellite-related errors and its performance can be significantly improved by using measurements from multi-GNSS constellations compared with using only one system, such as GPS. The Japanese Multi-GNSS Advanced Demonstration tool for Orbit and Clock Analysis (MADOCA) provides these corrections for GPS, GLONASS and QZSS satellites enabling a multi-GNSS RT-PPP. However, the accuracy of RT PPP will suffer a major decline in case of presence of an outage in receiving these corrections, for instance due to a temporary failure of the user modem. For that reason, a method is proposed to maintain RT PPP when such a break takes place. For short outages less than 30 minutes we predict MADOCA orbits using a Holt-Winters' auto-regressive model, and for longer outages up to 1 hr, the most recent International GNSS Service (IGS) ultra-rapid orbits can be used, but only for GPS. In addition, the clock corrections are predicted as a time series using a linear model with sinusoidal terms. The best regression period to estimate the required model parameters is discussed based on analysis of the autocorrelation of the corrections. The prediction model parameters are estimated using a sliding time window. Evaluation of the proposed method showed that positioning accuracy of 15 cm was maintained during the prediction period, which is twice better than using IGS ultra-rapid predicted products. For NHSW, the displacement errors due to prediction errors were generally within ±6 cm with one min interval and ±10 cm with five min interval.