Precise positioning of underwater transponders plays a significant role on seafloor geodetic deformation research, ocean engineering and underwater navigation (e.g., Guo et al., 2009;Sato et al., 2013). The prevalent approach to achieve the underwater positioning is GPS-acoustic method (Fujita et al., 2006;Zhao, Chen, Wu, & Feng, 2018), which combines the kinematic global positioning system (GPS) on a survey vessel with acoustic commutative interrogation between the onboard transducer and the underwater transponder. Generally, the method can be divided into two parts: One is the vessel region and the other is the underwater region.