‘Tropospheric refraction ‘The effect of the neutral atmosphere (i.e., the nonionized part) is denoted as tropospheric refraction, tropospheric path delay, or simply tropospheric delay. The naming is slightly incorrect because it excludes the stratosphere which is another constituent of the neutral atmosphere. However, the dom- inant contribution of the troposphere explains the choice of the name. The neutral atmosphere is a nondispersive medium with respect to radio waves up to frequencies of 15 GHz. Thus, the propagation is frequency inde- pendent. Consequently, a distinction between carrier phases and code ranges derived from different carriers L1 or L2 is not necessary. The disadvantage is that an elimination of the tropospheric refraction by dual frequency methods is not possible. ‘The tropospheric path delay is defined by Atrer fo =-1)ds (6.80) which is analogous to the ionospheric formula (6.54). Again an approxima- tion is introduced so that the integration is performed along the geometric path of the signal. Usually, instead of the refractive index n the refractivity NTP = 109(n = 1) (6.81) is used so that Eq. (6.80) becomes ATep 10~® [| NTP ds. (6.82)Hopfield (1969) shows the possibility of separating N™°? into a dry and a wet component Ne = NPP 4 Nir (6.83) where the dry part results from the dry atmosphere and the wet part from the water vapor. Correspondingly, the relations Aber — 10? [ nP ds (6.84) Atop — 10-* [wpe ds (6.85) and Atrop = ATPP 4 ATrop: (6.86) = 10-8 f wer ds+ 10 f nye ds are obtained. About 90% of the tropospheric refraction arise from the dry and about 10% from the wet component. In practice, models for the re- fractivities are introduced in Eq. (6.86) and the integration is performed by numerical methods or analytically after, e.g., series expansions of the integrand. Models for the dry and wet refractivity at the surface of the earth have been known for some time (e.g., Essen and Froome 1951). The corresponding dry component is aq =ak, @ = 17.64 Kmb™ (6.87) where pis the atmospheric pressure in millibar (mb) and J’ is the temperature in Kelvin (K). The wet component was found to be & = -12.96 Kmb7? (6.88) @3 = 3.718-10 K? mb7> where ¢ is the partial pressure of water vapor in mb and 7 again the tempera- ture in K. The overbar in the coefficients only stresses that there is absolutely no relationship to the coefficients for the ionosphere in, e.g., (6.57). The values for 2, é, and és are empirically determined and, certainly, cannot fully describe the local situation. An improvement is obtained by measuring meteorological data at the observation site. The following para- graphs present several models where meteorological surface data are taken into account.ty ha 40 kin ‘observation Ss site earth's surface Fig. 6.3. Thickness of polytropic layers for the troposphere Hopfield model Using real data covering the whole earth, Hopfield (1969) has empirically found a representation of the dry refractivity as a function of the height h above the surface by ha — hy pera) = wie [—*] (6.89) alr under the assumption of a polytropic layer with thickness hq = 40136 + 148.72(T — 273.16) [m], (6.90) as shown in Fig. 6.3. Substitution of (6.89) into (6.84) yields (for the dry part) the tropospheric path delay _ ae 0-8 ng f (“= *| ds. (6.91) “Trop = AG ‘The integral can be solved if the delay is calculated along the vertical di- rection and if the curvature of the signal path is neglected. Thus, for an observation site on the surface of the earth (i.e., Ah = 0), Eq. (6.91) becomes hha Abe = 10-8 iter ma / (ig — hy* dh (6.92) rbo where the constant denominator has been extracted. After integration, 1 ns haha ATP = 107-6 WTreP ke [Ets hye " bd (6.93) =o