Determinación del contenido de vapor de agua precipitable (PWV) a partir de mediciones GPS: primeros resultados en Argentina

the proposal of this work consists of the usage of gps (global positioning system) to determine the precipitable water vapor content over our country, taking advantage of the benefits of the gps: lower costs, possibility of measurements at any point of the planet and under any climatic condition; providing precisions and accuracies comparable to those of the classic technologies. the estimation of pwv (precipitable water vapor) integrated at the zenithal direction of the station from gps measurements constitutes the first one and more elementary of the determinations realized by the gps meteorology. with this name one refers to the set of interdisciplinary works carried out by scientists of the atmospheric sciences along with geodesists ad geophysicists, principally. this new discipline was born at the beginning of the decade of the 90 (bevis et al., 1992). it has advanced up to making the tomography of the water vapor possible in a given region (bi et al., 2006). nevertheless, its best known application consists of the assimilation of the water vapor data, obtained in almost real time, in numerical weather models. the application of this methodology is new in argentina. in this work we present the generation of pwv values as a sub product of the precise geodetic processing. the last must be done by using the gps observations from the stations belonging to the radep (argentinean network of permanent gps stations) but they must have a meteorological station co-located. after explaining how to obtain the information, the advantages and differences of this methodology are explained with regard to the classic determinations from radiometers or radiosondes. the application is exemplified presenting pwv's results calculated for the gps permanent stations lpgs (la plata, buenos aires) and riog (río grande, tierra del fuego). finally, the state of the art of the gps meteorology is discussed in the international context and some previous applications in argentina are also de