At present, the global reliability and accuracy of Precipitable Water Vapor (PWV) from different reanalysis products have not been comprehensively evaluated. In this study, PWV values derived by 268 Global Navigation Satellite Systems (GNSS) stations around the world covering the period from 2016 to 2018 are used to evaluate the accuracies of PWV values from five reanalysis products. The temporal and spatial evolution is not taken into account in this analysis, although the temporal and spatial evolution of atmospheric flows is one of the most important information elements available in numerical weather prediction products. The evaluation results present that five reanalysis products with PWV accuracy from high to low are in the order of the fifth generation of European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts (ECMWF) Reanalysis (ERA5), ERA-Interim, Japanese 55-year Reanalysis (JRA-55), National Centers for Environmental Prediction/National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCEP/NCAR), and NCEP/DOE (Department of Energy) according to root mean square error (RMSE), bias and correlation coefficient. The ERA5 has the smallest RMSE value of 1.84 mm, while NCEP/NCAR and NCEP/DOE have bigger RMSE values of 3.34 mm and 3.51 mm, respectively. The findings demonstrate that ERA5 and two NCEP reanalysis products have the best and worst performance, respectively, among five reanalysis products. The differences in the accuracy of the five reanalysis products are mainly attributed to the differences in the spatial resolution of reanalysis products. There are some large absolute biases greater than 4 mm between GNSS PWV values and the PWV values of five reanalysis products in the southwest of South America and western China due to the limit of terrains and fewer observations. The accuracies of five reanalysis products are compared in different climatic zones. The results indicate that the absolute accuracies of five reanalysis products are highest in the polar regions and lowest in the tropics. Furthermore, the effects of different seasons on the accuracies of five reanalysis products are also analyzed, which indicates that RMSE values of five reanalysis products in summer and in winter are the largest and the smallest in the temperate regions. Evaluation results from five reanalysis products can help us to learn more about the advantages and disadvantages of the five released water vapor products and promote their applications.

The latest reanalysis of the European Center for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts (ECMWF), ERA5, can provide atmospheric data for calculating Zenith Tropospheric Delay (ZTD) with hourly temporal resolution, which is a key factor in Global Navigation Satellite System (GNSS) high-precision application. This paper is aimed at evaluating the performance of ZTD derived from ERA5 reanalysis data over China using 219 GNSS stations of the Crustal Movement Observation Network of China (CMONOC) covering the period from 2015 to 2016. The site-specific hourly ZTD at these stations is obtained by integration method and Saastamoinen model method on ERA5 pressure-level and surface-level reanalysis data with the temporal resolution of 1 h and the spatial resolution of 0.25° × 0.25°. Firstly, the atmospheric temperature and pressure that derived from ERA5 are compared with temperature and pressure obtained from meteorological sensors available at 193 GNSS stations. The biases are 2.31 °C and 1.26 mbar implying the accuracy and feasibility of ERA5 pressure and temperature for calculating ZTD over China. Secondly, the performance of ERA5 ZTD is systematically evaluated using ZTD from 219 GNSS sites. The average bias and Root Mean Square (RMS) of ERA5 pressure-level ZTD at all test stations in integration method are approximately 2.97 mm and 11.49 mm respectively, and those of ERA5 surface-level ZTD in model method are 7.97 mm, 39.25 mm, which indicates that ERA5 pressure-level ZTD has a higher accuracy over China. Further analysis indicates that the accuracies of ZTD derived from ERA5 pressure-level and surface-level data are approximately 13.8% and 10.9% higher than those from of ERA-Interim pressure-level and surface-level data. Moreover, ERA5 is able to accurately capture the short-term (hourly) variation of ZTD, which further indicates the better performance of ERA5. Thirdly, the temporal and spatial variation characteristics of ERA5 ZTD accuracy are further analyzed over China. The results show that the ZTD in the southern region has the lower accuracy compared with that in the northern region over China due to the influence of latitude and altitude. Furthermore, it is found that the ERA5 ZTD over China has obvious seasonality, with higher accuracy in winter and lower accuracy in summer.

The meteorological reanalysis data has been widely applied to derive zenith tropospheric delay (ZTD) with a high spatial and temporal resolution. With the rapid development of artificial intelligence, machine learning also begins as a high-efficiency tool to be employed in modeling and predicting ZTD. In this paper, we develop three new regional ZTD models based on the least squares support vector machine (LSSVM), using both the International GNSS Service (IGS)-ZTD products and European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts Reanalysis 5 (ERA5) data over Europe throughout 2018. Among them, the ERA5 data is extended to ERA5S-ZTD and ERA5P-ZTD as the background data by the model method and integral method, respectively. Depending on different background data, three schemes are designed to construct ZTD models based on the LSSVM algorithm, including the without background data, with the ERA5S-ZTD, and with the ERA5P-ZTD. To investigate the advantage and feasibility of the proposed ZTD models, we evaluate the accuracy of two background data and three schemes by segmental comparison with the IGS-ZTD of 85 IGS stations in Europe. The results show that the overall average Root Mean Square Errors (RMSE) value of all sites is 30.1 mm for the ERA5S-ZTD, and 10.7 mm for the ERA5P-ZTD. The overall average RMSE is 25.8 mm, 22.9 mm, and 9 mm for the three schemes, respectively. Moreover, the overall improvement rate is 19.1% and 1.6% for the ZTD model with ERA5S-ZTD and ERA5P-ZTD, respectively. In order to explore the reason of the lower improvement for the ZTD model with ERA5P-ZTD, the loop verification is performed by estimating the ZTD values of each available IGS station. In actuality, the monthly improvement rate of estimated ZTD is positive for most stations, and the biggest improvement rate can even reach about 40%. The negative rate mainly comes from specific stations, these stations are located on the edge of the region, near the coast, as well as the lower similarity between the individual verified station and training stations.

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