Higher-order ionosphere modeling for CODE's next reprocessing activities

CODE (the Center for Orbit Determination in Europe) is a joint venture between the Astronomical Institute of the University of Bern (AIUB, Bern, Switzerland), the Federal Office of Topography (swisstopo, Wabern, Switzerland), the Federal Agency for Cartography and Geodesy (BKG, Frankfurt am Main, Germany), and the Institut für Astronomische und Phsyikalische Geodäsie of the Technische Universität München (IAPG/TUM, Munich, Germany). It acts as one of the global analysis centers of the International GNSS Service (IGS) and participates in the first IGS reprocessing campaign, a full reanalysis of GPS data collected since 1994. For a future reanalyis of the IGS data it is planned to consider not only first-order but also higher-order ionosphere terms in the space geodetic observations. There are several works (e.g. Fritsche et al. 2005), which showed a significant and systematic influence of these effects on the analysis results. The development version of the Bernese Software used at CODE is expanded by the ability to assign additional (scaling) parameters to each considered higher-order ionosphere term. By this, each correction term can be switched on and off on normal-equation level and, moreover, the significance of each correction term may be verified on observation level for different ionosphere conditions.