Moderate Geomagnetic Storm Condition, WAAS Alerts and real GPS Positioning Quality

Article history Received: 22 November 2018 Accepted: 7 January 2019 Published: 1 March 2019 The most significant part of Wade Area Augmentation System (WAAS) integrity consists of the User Differential Range Error (UDRE) and the Grid Ionospheric Vertical Error (GIVE). WAAS solutions are not completely appropriate to determine the GIVE term within the entire coverage zone taking in account real irregular structure of the ionosphere. It leads to the larger confidence bounding terms and lower expected positioning availability in comparison to the reality under geomagnetic storm conditions and system outages. Thus a question arises: is the basic WAAS concept appropriate to provide the same efficiency of the integrity monitoring for both “global differential correction” (i.e. clock, ephemeris et al.) and “local differential correction” (i.e. ionosphrere, troposhpere and multipath)? The aim of this paper is to compare official WAAS integrity monitoring reports and real positioning quality in US coverage zone (CONUS) and Canada area under geomagnetic storm con-ditions and system outages. In this research we are interested in compari-son between real GPS positioning quality based on single-frequency C/A ranging mode and HAL (VAL) values which correspond to the LP, LPV and LPV200 requirements. Significant mismatch of the information be-tween WAAS integrity data and real positioning quality was unfolded as a result of this comparison under geomagnetic storms and system outages on February 14, 2011 and June 22, 2015. Based on this result we think that in order to achieve high confidence of WAAS positioning availability alerts real ionospheric measurements within the wide area coverage zone must be involved instead of the WAAS GIVE values. The better way to realize this idea is to combine WAAS solutions to derive “global differential cor-rections” and LAAS solutions to derive “local differential corrections”.