Cloudy with a chance of noise

Presented by: Michael Moore

One annoying geodetic variable is a treasure trove of information to meteorologists.

This talk will focus on a project in partnership with the BoM, RMIT and FrontierSI that turned our estimates of the tropospheric delay in our GPS analysis into useful information for weather forecasting systems.

The system works by measuring the time it takes GPS signals from satellites to reach ground receivers. Moisture in the troposphere can slightly delay these signals, causing what is known as a ‘zenith total delay’, so scientists measure this delay to assess air moisture.

While the technology could be applied almost anywhere, it is particularly valuable in a sparsely populated country like Australia where there is a lack of ground-based meteorological observation stations.

Atmospheric water vapour is highly variable and non-linear in nature, yet it is important for accurate weather forecasting of storms. Having a direct observation from GPS provides an exciting opportunity for near and real-time weather forecasting systems.

Michael Moore is a Global Navigation Satellite Systems (GNSS) Scientist with the Positioning program at Geoscience Australia. He obtained his PhD from the Australian National University on mitigating site-specific errors from geodetic time series. Michael is currently the Team lead of the Ginan Positioning toolkit, and is responsible for the coordination of the International GNSS Service (IGS) analysis centres operating around the world.