Abstract. Water vapour plays a dominant role in the climate change debate. However, observing water vapour over a climatological time period in a consistent and homogeneous manner is challenging. On one hand, networks of groundbased instruments able to retrieve homogeneous integrated water vapour (IWV) data sets are being set up. Typical examples are Global Navigation Satellite System (GNSS) observation networks such as the International GNSS Service (IGS), with continuous GPS (Global Positioning System) observations spanning over the last 15+ years, and the AErosol RObotic NETwork (AERONET), providing long-term observations performed with standardized and well-calibrated sun photometers. On the other hand, satellite-based measurements of IWV already have a time span of over 10 years (e.g. AIRS) or are being merged to create long-term time series (e.g. GOME, SCIAMACHY, and GOME-2).This study performs an intercomparison of IWV measurements from satellite devices (in the visible, GOME/SCIAMACHY/GOME-2, and in the thermal infrared, AIRS), in situ measurements (radiosondes) and ground-based instruments (GPS, sun photometer), to assess their use in water vapour trends analysis. To this end, we selected 28 sites world-wide for which GPS observations can directly be compared with coincident satellite IWV observations, together with sun photometer and/or radiosonde measurements. The mean biases of the different techniques compared to the GPS estimates vary only between −0.3 to 0.5 mm of IWV. Nevertheless these small biases are accompanied by large standard deviations (SD), especially for the satellite instruments. In particular, we analysed the impact of clouds on the IWV agreement. The influence of specific issues for each instrument on the intercomparison is also investigated (e.g. the distance between the satellite ground pixel centre and the co-located ground-based station, the satellite scan angle, daytime/nighttime differences). Furthermore, we checked if the properties of the IWV scatter plots between these different instruments are dependent on the geography and/or altitude of the station. For all considered instruments, the only dependency clearly detected is with latitude: the SD of the IWV observations with respect to the GPS IWV retrievals decreases with increasing latitude and decreasing mean IWV.

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When neglecting calibration issues, the accuracy of GPS-based time and frequency transfer using a combined analysis of code and carrier phase measurements highly depends on the noise of the GPS codes. In particular, the pseudorange noise is responsible for day-boundary discontinuities which can reach more than 1 ns in the time transfer results obtained from geodetic analysis. These discontinuities are caused by the fact that the data are analyzed in daily data batches where the absolute clock offset is determined by the mean code value during the daily data batch. This pseudorange noise is not a white noise, in particular due to multipath and variations of instrumental delays. In this paper, the pseudorange noise behavior is characterized in order to improve the understanding of the origin of the large day-boundary discontinuities in the geodetic time transfer results. In a first step, the effect of short-term noise and multipath is estimated, and shown to be responsible for only a maximum of 150 ps (picoseconds) of the day-boundary jumps, with only one exception at NRC1 where the correction provides a jump reduction of 300 ps. In a second step, a combination of time transfer results obtained with pseudoranges only and geodetic time transfer results is used to characterize the long-term evolution of pseudorange errors. It demonstrates that the day-boundary jumps, especially those of large amplitude, can be explained by an instrumental effect imposing a common behavior on all the satellite pseudoranges. Using known influences as temperature variations at ALGO or cable damages at HOB2, it is shown that the approach developed in this study can be used to look for the origin of the day-boundary discontinuities in other stations.

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