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A. Hofmeister, J. Böhm:
"Ray-traced Delays in the Atmosphere for Geodetic VLBI";
in: "IVS 2014 General Meeting Proceedings", D. Behrend, K. Baver, K. Armstrong (ed.); Science Press, Beijing, China, 2014, ISBN: 978-7-03-042974-2, 283 - 287.

The application of ray-traced slant path delays has the potential to enhance geodetic Very Long
Baseline Interferometry (VLBI) analysis through improving the correction of the tropospheric effects on
the observations. The utilization of directly estimated ray-traced slant path delays calculated from true meteorological data has the potential to overcome the shortcomings of the commonly used method of indirectly determined slant path delays via zenith delays mapped to the actual observation angle. Within our project RADIATE VLBI (Ray-traced Delays in the Atmosphere for geodetic VLBI) we are developing a new ray-tracing program for application in geodetic VLBI analysis. We introduce our project and present an overview of the current development status of our ray-tracer. In order to verify our results, we compare our ray-traced delays to results of a ray-tracer comparison campaign by Nafisi et al. (2012b), [4]. The RADIATE piecewise-linear solution for the slant total delay calculated from mapping factors at 5◦ elevation agrees with most of the other ray-tracers, with mean differences below 1 cm and standard deviations below 0.6 cm at the station Tsukuba and mean differences below 2.5 cm and standard deviations below 1 cm at the station Wettzell.

Ray-tracing, troposphere, VLBI

https://publik.tuwien.ac.at/files/publik_237722.pdf