Atmospheric calibration applied to CONT05 VLBI data

R. Haas

Department of Radio and Space Science, Chalmers University of Technology, Sweden

Oral presentation

The 15 day long continuous VLBI campaign CONT05 involved eleven IVS network stations. All of them are co-located with IGS-stations and several of the participating stations were equipped with one or several ground-based microwave radiometers during the CONT05 campaign. These microwave radiometers were of different type and they were operated following different observing strategies, e.g. only-zenith observations or sky-mapping observations. In this presentation the focus is on the atmospheric parameters observed during CONT05. In a first step the independent result for zenith wet delays and gradients (where possible) derived from the different co-located techniques are compared and their level of agreement is evaluated. In the next step the zenith wet delay and gradient results derived from the co-located microwave radiometers (where available) and/or GNSS are used as atmospheric calibration for the VLBI data bases. Then several analysis strategies for the calibrated VLBI data are applied and the impact of using the atmospheric calibration on the geodetic VLBI results, e.g. baseline length, is evaluated.