The EUMETNET EIG GNSS water vapour programme | E-GVAP
Aside from main geodetic applications, GNSS has become an established atmospheric observing system for water vapour with high spatiotemporal resolution. In Europe, the application of GNSS in meteorology is a well-established field in both research and operation. Since 2005, E-GVAP (The EUMETNET EIG GNSS water vapour programme, egvap.dmi.dk) is in charge of the collection and quality control of operational GNSS tropospheric products for numerical weather models (NWM). GFZ is one of the operational E-GVAP Analysis Centres (ACs) and processes with GFZ EPOS software more than 600 GNSS stations with a time delay better than 15 minutes after each hour (near real-time).
The tropospheric products provided by GFZ are used by several European weather services like the German Weather Service DWD, the Met Office, the United Kingdom's national weather service, and Météo-France, the French national meteorological service an others for their day-by-day forecasts.
Additionally, GFZ provides as only one of the E-GVAP Analysis Centres the Slant Total Delays (STDs) with a time resolution of 2.5 minutes. At the same time, these specific data from up to 40 navigation satellites are currently used for studies to improve the precipitation forecast of the German Weather Service DWD.
Products
Dick, G., Wickert, J., Zus, F., Männel, B., Bradke, M., Ramatschi, M., Brandt, A. (2024) GFZ GNSS-derived tropospheric data products (ultra-rapid). V. 1.0. GFZ Data Services, https://doi.org/10.5880/GFZ.1.1.2024.002
Dick, Galina; Wickert, Jens; Zus, Florian; Benjamin, Männel; Bradke, Markus; Ramatschi, Markus; Brandt, Andre (2025): GFZ GNSS-derived tropospheric data products (rapid). V. 1.0. GFZ Data Services. doi.org/10.5880/GFZ.IRZR.2025.002
Dick, Galina; Wickert, Jens; Zus, Florian; Benjamin, Männel; Bradke, Markus; Ramatschi, Markus; Brandt, Andre (2025): GFZ GNSS-derived tropospheric data products (global). V. 1.0. GFZ Data Services. doi.org/10.5880/GFZ.IRZR.2025.003
References
Thundathil, R., Zus, F., Dick, G., Wickert, J. (2024): Assimilation of GNSS tropospheric gradients into the Weather Research and Forecasting (WRF) model version 4.4.1. Geoscientific Model Development, 17, 9, 3599-3616. doi.org/10.5194/gmd-17-3599-2024
Wickert, J., Dick, G., Schmidt, T., Asgarimehr, M., Antonoglou, N., Arras, C., Brack, A., Ge, M., Kepkar, A., Männel, B., Nguyen Thai, C., Oluwadare, T. S., Schuh, H., Semmling, M., Simeonov, T., Vey, S., Wilgan, K., Zus, F. (2020): GNSS Remote Sensing at GFZ: Overview and Recent Results. ZfV: Zeitschrift für Geodäsie, Geoinformation und Landmanagement, 145, 5, 266-278, doi: 10.12902/zfv-0320-2020
