ASSESSING THE QUALITY OF THE NEAR REAL-TIME REGIONAL VTEC MAPS PRODUCED BY LA PLATA UNIVERSITY IN ABSOLUTE GNSS POSITIONING OVER BRAZIL

At the end of 2018, the Laboratorio de Meteorologia Espacial, Atmosfera Terrestre, Geodesia, Geodinamica, Diseno de Instrumental y Astrometria, from La Plata University, started providing near real-time Regional Ionosphere Maps (MAGN) with high spatial and temporal resolutions and low latency. In this paper, we show a performance evaluation of these new ionosphere maps in space of positioning during the first year (2019) of available data. The assessment was carried out through absolute GNSS positioning using the in-house RT-PPP software. Data from five stations in Brazil, distributed in different geomagnetic latitudes, were processed. The performance of the MAGN was evaluated comparing the coordinates estimated using MAGN maps and the Global Ionosphere Maps (GIM) from CODE, both concerning the PPP ionosphere-free combination solution. Although it has been found that, in general, the MAGN and CODE solutions are compatible, the former provided better positioning result (8.5%) in the altimetric (up) component. However, when an atypical behavior in the MAGN solution at the end of the year 2019 as well as days of incomplete maps were removed from the analysis, the solution with MAGN becomes slightly better than CODE, providing an improvement of 8.6% in the up component.