Although Light Detection and Ranging (LiDAR) technology is currently one of the most efficient methods for acquiring high-density point cloud, there are still challenges in terms of data reliability. In particular, the accuracy assessment of LiDAR data, especially in the height component, is one of the main issues in this context. This study introduces a rapid and cost-effective platform to improve the accuracy and precision of LiDAR data by integrating high-density GNSS-Ranging measurements with LiDAR data. The platform offers the capability to rapidly collect a significant number of network real time kinematic (NRTK) points with centimetric precision. A continuous correction surface is proposed to integrate the platform and LiDAR data, resulting in improved accuracy for all ground-class LiDAR data. Evaluation using GNSS benchmarks and NRTK checkpoints showed a significant reduction in LiDAR height errors after applying the correction surface. The root mean squares error (RMSE) decreased from 18.5 cm to 8.2 cm when compared to GNSS benchmarks and from 17.4 cm to 5.3 cm for approximately 1000 NRTK control points. The results indicate that collecting a large number of high-density GNSS ground targets and applying a correction surface to LiDAR height data significantly enhance the accuracy and precision of the LiDAR extracted products.

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High diversity seabed habitats, such as shellfish aggregations, play a significant role in marine ecosystem sustainability but are susceptible to bottom disturbance induced by anthropogenic activities. Regular monitoring of these habitats with effective mapping methods is therefore essential. Multibeam echosounder (MBES) has been widely used in recent decades for seabed characterization due to its non-destructive manner and extensive spatial coverage compared to traditional methods like bottom sampling. Nevertheless, bottom sampling remains essential to link ground truth with acoustic seabed classification. Using seabed samples and MBES measurements, machine learning techniques are commonly employed to model their relationships and generate classification maps of an extended seabed. However, limited ground truth data, resulting from constraints in regulations, budget, or time, may impede the development of robust machine learning models. To address this challenge, we applied a semi-supervised machine learning method to classify seabed sediments of a blue mussel (Mytilus edulis) cultivation area in the Oosterschelde, the Netherlands. We utilized nine boxcore samples to generate pseudo-labels on MBES data. These pseudo-labels enlarged the training data size, facilitated the training of three comprehensive machine learning algorithms (Gradient Boosting, Random Forest, and Support Vector Machine), and helped to classify the study site into mussel and non-mussel areas. We found the geomorphological and backscatter-related features to be complementary for mussel culture detection. Our classification results were demonstrated effective through expert knowledge of this cultivation area and brought insights for future research on natural mussel habitats.

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The growth shown by the aviation industry has given significant economic benefits, but also causes disturbance to communities living near airports, including annoyance and potential health problems due to the high aviation-induced noise levels. Therefore, regulations are implemented by imposing limits on the yearly cumulative noise levels at specific locations around airports. This requires understanding and prediction of the varying aircraft noise levels. This is traditionally achieved by using so-called best-practice or regulatory models, such as the Dutch aircraft noise model, which require low computational costs and limited model inputs. This way of noise monitoring comes with significant model approximations and hence potential deviations of the model predictions from the actual noise levels. The limitations of this current approach has given rise to distrust in communities near airports. Hence, the models need to be validated against real measurements, for which use is made of the stations from the Noise Monitoring System (NOMOS) around Schiphol Airport. In this contribution, we analyzed the time series of the yearly averaged L_den measured at 35 NOMOS stations for the period from 2006 to 2022. A distinction is made between noise from aircraft and that due to other noise sources. We observe a decreasing trend of 0.52 ± 0.04 dB(A)/year in L_den for the investigated time period. One of the objectives is to determine how the measured L_den can be assigned to the various aircraft types in the fleet at Schiphol. This is performed by an L_den time series analysis of the averaged time series over all stations, combined with changes in the fleet composition. The results from the unconstrained least squares (LS) and non-negative least squares (NNLS) methods are presented and compared. Based on the obtained model for 2006-2020, predictions are performed for 2021 and 2022.

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Hyperspectral unmixing (HU), an essential procedure for various environmental applications, has garnered significant attention within remote sensing communities. Among different groups of HU methods, nonnegative matrix factorization (NMF)-based ones have gained widespread popularity due to their high capability of simultaneously extracting endmembers and their corresponding abundances. However, converting a 3-D hyperspectral data cube into a 2-D matrix format leads to the loss of spatial and potential correlation information. Consequently, in recent years, nonnegative tensor factorization (NTF) methods, which preserve the 3-D nature of hyperspectral data cube, have been extensively embraced by numerous researchers. Nevertheless, incorporating prior information into NTF-based problems faces limitations owing to the inconsistency of such information, particularly concerning \ell {1} norm sparsity and the abundance sum-to-one constraint (ASC). To address this limitation, our study introduces a novel general regularization term. This term leverages sparsity and ASC simultaneously, integrating it into a matrix-tensor factorization framework. Our proposed method, named a matrix-tensor-based HU method with general \ell {q} norm regularization (MTUHL{q}), is established on the block term decomposition (BTD) paradigm, which ensures physical interpretability and simple implementation. To investigate the performance of the proposed MTUHL{q}, a series of experiments on both synthetic and real hyperspectral datasets were conducted. The results of the implemented experiments indicated that the proposed method outperformed other state-of-the-art HU methods.

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To regulate aircraft noise impact on communities surrounding airports, best-practice models are used to predict aircraft noise levels. In this research the Noise-Power-Distance (NPD) tables in the European Doc.29 noise model are evaluated with measurements around Amsterdam Airport Schiphol. Even with accurate input parameters (thrust and distance to the observer), differences in modelled and measured noise levels are found, which are assumed to be due to the errors in the NPD table. To further investigate this, thrust-noise relations are derived from measurements. These relations are found to differ from the original NPD tables. Using the measured thrust-noise relations, the modelled and measured mean noise levels are in agreement and the standard deviation of the differences is reduced by 25% for departure operations. This finding is consequently verified with independent measurements around Oslo Airport Gardermoen. Next to an improvement in best-practice noise modelling, the methods described in this research give insight into the creation and validation of NPD tables.@en

Since 2020, all commercial aircraft have been mandated to be equipped with ADS-B Out
transponders. Despite the many advantages of locating an aircraft with openly available and
accessible data, it also has some limitations. Firstly, not all aircraft, such as general aviation, are required to transmit their locations; secondly, due to obstacles such as buildings,
a location is not always transmitted at lower altitudes (75-130 m); thirdly, it is vulnerable to cyberattacks. Therefore, while it is convenient to have ADS-B Out data, creating a
computationally efficient alternative methodology for determining the aircraft location is
advisable. This paper investigates the accuracy, efficiency, and computational cost of two
methods of source localization using data taken by an array of microphones: a global optimization (GO) method called the differential evolution (DE) and the conventional beam-
forming approach (CBF). The real-world data required as input for both methods is obtained
with a 64-microphone phased array placed at a distance of 1.14 km from Rotterdam The
Hague Airport (RTHA). The 2-dimensional flight trajectories, i.e., azimuth, and elevation
relative to the array, obtained from the GO and CBF methods, are compared with the ADS-
B Out data for approaching and departing flyovers. Furthermore, the smallest size of an
array required for satisfactory localization accuracy is investigated.@en

Inspired by the attractive features of least-squares theory in many practical applications, this contribution introduces least-squares-based deep learning (LSBDL). Least-squares theory connects explanatory variables to predicted variables, called observations, through a linear(ized) model in which the unknown parameters of this relation are estimated using the principle of least-squares. Conversely, deep learning (DL) methods establish nonlinear relationships for applications where predicted variables are unknown (nonlinear) functions of explanatory variables. This contribution presents the DL formulation based on least-squares theory in linear models. As a data-driven method, a network is trained to construct an appropriate design matrix of which its entries are estimated using two descent optimization methods: steepest descent and Gauss–Newton. In conjunction with interpretable and explainable artificial intelligence, LSBDL leverages the well-established least-squares theory for DL applications through the following three-fold objectives: (i) Quality control measures such as covariance matrix of predicted outcome can directly be determined. (ii) Available least-squares reliability theory and hypothesis testing can be established to identify mis-specification and outlying observations. (iii) Observations’ covariance matrix can be exploited to train a network with inconsistent, heterogeneous and statistically correlated data. Three examples are presented to demonstrate the theory. The first example uses LSBDL to train coordinate basis functions for a surface fitting problem. The second example applies LSBDL to time series forecasting. The third example showcases a real-world application of LSBDL to downscale groundwater storage anomaly data. LSBDL offers opportunities in many fields of geoscience, aviation, time series analysis, data assimilation and data fusion of multiple sensors.

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The provision of accurate ionospheric corrections in PPP-RTK enormously improves the performance of single-receiver user integer ambiguity resolution (IAR), thus enabling fast high precision positioning. While an external provider can disseminate such corrections to the user with a time delay, it is the task of the user to accurately time-predict the corrections so that they become applicable to the user positioning time. Accurate time prediction of the corrections requires a dynamic model in which the process noise of the corrections has to be correctly specified. In this contribution, we present an estimation method to determine the process noise variance of PPP-RTK corrections using single-receiver GNSS data. Our focus is on variance estimation of the first-order slant ionospheric delays, which allows one to analyze how the ionospheric process noise changes as a function of the solar activity, receiver local time, and receiver geographic latitude. By analyzing 11-year GNSS datasets, it is illustrated that estimates of the ionospheric process noise are strongly correlated with the solar flux index F10.7. These estimates also indicate a seasonal variation, with the highest level of variation observed during the spring and autumn equinoxes.

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Gravity recovery and climate experiment (GRACE) and GRACE Follow-On (GRACE-FO) are Earth's gravity satellite missions with hydrological monitoring applications. However, caused by measuring instrumental problems, there are several temporal missing values in the dataset of the two missions where a long gap between the mission dataset also exists. Recent studies utilized different gap-filling methodologies to fill those data gaps. In this article, we employ a variety of singular spectrum analysis (SSA) algorithms as well as the least squares-harmonic estimation (LS-HE) approach for the data gap-filling. These methods are implemented on six hydrological basins, where the performance of the algorithms is validated for different artificial gap scenarios. Our results indicate that each hydrological basin has its special behaviour. LS-HE outperforms the other algorithms in half of the basins, whereas in the other half, SSA provides a better performance. This highlights the importance of different factors affecting the deterministic signals and stochastic characteristics of climatological time series. To fill the missing values of such time series, it is therefore required to investigate the time series behaviour on their time-invariant and time-varying characteristics before processing the series.

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The weighted total least squares (WTLS) has been widely used in many geodetic problems to solve the error-in-variable (EIV) models in which both the observation vector and the design matrix contain random errors. This method is widely applied in its univariate form, where the observations and unknown coefficients appear in vector forms. However, in some geodetic problems, data sets appear in more than one dimension, and the vector representation of the univariate model may not be suitable to efficiently solve the problem. The observation and unknown parameter vectors can then be replaced with their counterparts in matrix representations in a multivariate model. In this paper, we propose a simple, fast, and flexible procedure for solving the multivariate WTLS (MWTLS) problem using the standard least squares theory. The method has the capability of applying to large-size and high-dimensional data sets. Our numerical experiments on both simulated and real datasets demonstrate the high performance of the proposed method for solving multivariate WTLS problems. In terms of computational complexity, our method outperforms the existing state-of-the-art methods, both numerically and analytically.

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This study aims to investigate how changes in meteorological indicators affect groundwater resources, and hence to predict groundwater levels using these indicators, particularly in regions experiencing drought and subsidence. Precipitation, temperature, evapotranspiration and precipitable water vapor (PWV) are important meteorological parameters to predict groundwater levels. Two subsidence areas with different weather conditions were selected to conduct a comprehensive study on the effect of temperature and precipitation on groundwater level changes. The correct locations of the two subsidence areas were determined by analyzing Interferometric Synthetic Aperture Radar (InSAR) images of Sentinel-1A using the small baseline subset algorithm. The interferograms were processed to correct tropospheric effects using the advanced integration method. Specifying the exact locations of the two areas, the meteorological parameters were downscaled using the Statistical DownScaling Model (SDSM), synoptic observations, meteorological data, and the General Circulation Model (GCM). An Artificial Neural Network (ANN) was then employed to predict the groundwater level changes as a function of meteorological data, including Global Positioning System (GPS)-based PWV and the evapotranspiration index. The trained ANN, along with the downscaled meteorological indicators, was used to predict groundwater level changes over two time periods. In the first period, the prediction was performed over the current years to investigate the performance of the method using the available data, whereas in the second period, the prediction was performed for the coming years, up until 2030. The results confirmed the high performance of the prediction algorithm, and the importance of including PWV and evapotranspiration in groundwater level predictions. The Pearson correlation coefficient was used to check the relationship between groundwater level changes and meteorological variables. The statistical significance of these coefficients was tested at the significance level α=0.05. In more than 80% of the cases, the correlation coefficients were statistically significant, reaching more than 0.70 in some of the months. It is also observed that an increase in the depth of groundwater level has an obvious relationship with an increase in temperature and a decrease in rainfall.@en

Acoustic classification using single-beam and multi-beam echosounders has been widely applied in characterizing seabed sediments. Although previous studies have shown a better discrimination of fine and coarse sediments using multi-spectral echosounder data, analysis regarding comprehensive seabed sediment properties is still needed. In this study, we used single-beam data of 24 kHz, as well as multi-beam data of 90 and 300 kHz to investigate the benefits of multi-spectral backscatter data in describing sediment properties including median grain size; weight percentages of gravel, sand, and mud; volume percentages of stones, shell fragments, and living bivalves; as well as density of acoustically hard animals (molluscs and the tube-building worm Lanice conchilega). We classified data of each frequency in an unsupervised manner, using K-means clustering for the single-beam echo time series and Bayesian classification for the multi-beam backscatter. Compared with the top-layer sediment properties, we found classification of 90 and 300 kHz consistent with variations of median grain size and L. conchilega density, whereas classification of 24 kHz can also be related to the percentages of shell fragments and stones. In addition, one acoustic class of 24 kHz might indicate a higher gravel content in the subsurface of the study area. Although quantitative relationships between backscatter and sediment properties are still difficult to achieve given a limited number of samples, using multi-spectral backscatter data is a potential approach to characterize seabed sediments from various perspectives.

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The Urmia lake in north-west Iran has dried up to perilously low levels in the past two decades. In this study, we investigate the drivers behind the decline in lake water level with the help of in-situ and remote sensing data. We use total water storage (TWS) changes from the gravity recovery and climate experiment (GRACE) satellite mission. TWS from GRACE includes all the water storage compartments in a column and is the only remote sensing product that can help in estimating groundwater storage (GWS) changes. The coarse spatial (approx. 300 km) resolution of GRACE does not allow us to identify local changes that may have led to the Urmia lake disaster. In this study, we tackle the poor resolution of the GRACE data by employing three machine learning (ML) methods including random forest (RF), support vector regression (SVR) and multi-layer perceptron (MLP). The methods predict the groundwater storage anomaly (GWSA), derived from GRACE, as a function of hydro-climatic variables such as precipitation, evapotranspiration, land surface temperature (LST) and normalized difference vegetation index (NDVI) on a finer scale of 0.25° × 0.25°. We found that i) The RF model exhibited highest R (0.98), highest NSE (0.96) and lowest RMSE (18.36 mm) values. ii) The RF downscaled data indicated that the exploitation of groundwater resources in the aquifers is the main driver of groundwater storage and changes in the regional ecosystem, which has been corroborated by few other studies as well. The impact of precipitation and evapotranspiration on the GWSA was found to be rather weak, indicating that the anthropogenic derivers had the most significant impact on the GWSA changes. iii) We generally observed a significant negative trend in GWSA, having also significant positive correlations with the well data. However, over regions with dam construction significant negative correlations were found.

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Before geodetically derived strain and rotation rates can be robustly compared to geological or seismological observations, we need reliable strain rate uncertainties. Various methods exist to compute strain rates from GNSS-derived interseismic velocities, but a realistic representation of interpolation uncertainties has remained a challenge. The main problem is that commonly used deterministic interpolation methods do not account for uncertainty resulting from the absence of information in between observation sites. We apply stochastic interpolation by means of ordinary kriging to propagate errors both from discontinuous data coverage as well as from observation uncertainties to our strain rate estimates. However, interseismic horizontal surface velocities in tectonically active regions are spatially highly non-stationary, with high spatial variability around active faults and lower velocity variability in tectonically more stable regions. This requires an extension of traditional ordinary kriging approaches. For interpolation uncertainties that reflect the local variability and spatial correlation of the observed surface velocities, we apply a novel method that incorporates the spatially variable statistics of the underlying data. We estimate realistic uncertainties and covariances of the interpolated velocity field. For regions with a high spatial velocity variability, we find a large increase in uncertainty with increasing distance from observation sites, while in areas with little spatial variability, we estimate a small increase in uncertainty with distance. Subsequently, we propagate interpolated velocity covariance to strain rate uncertainties, such that we can assess the statistical significance of the interpolated strain rate field. Applied to a number of actively deforming regions, including the Pacific coast of North America and Japan, we show to what degree we can robustly determine strain rates based on available GNSS-derived velocities. Realistic uncertainties assist the community to better discriminate continuous or localized deformation on active faults from the available geodetic data.@en

Drought is one of the most complex and threatening disasters, defined as a period of drier-than-normal conditions which results in water-related problems. In addition to climate variation, human activities can cause or intensify drought through groundwater overextraction, unsupervised expansion of agricultural lands, etc. One prime example of such drought has been observed in the Zayandehrud River basin in central Iran. We investigate the long-term (1986 to 2019) drought of the Zayandehrud River basin using meteorological, hydrological, and agricultural drought indices. The main focus of this research is to explore the impact of the irrigated area expansion in the upstream sub-basins on the agricultural drought of the downstream. To this end, different drought indices are employed over the whole basin and its sub-basins. The results indicate that the long-term precipitation index and snow reserves do not show a long-term trend during the study period, while the combined precipitation-evapotranspiration index and groundwater storage decline. The research concludes that the expansion of the agricultural lands in the river upstream, rising air temperature, and increasing population and industrial activities in the basin are most likely the driving forces to intensify the agricultural drought in the midstream and downstream parts of the basin.

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This paper introduces a method to automatically estimate vertical and horizontal clearances of highway viaducts and gantries from Mobile Laser Scanner (MLS) point clouds. It is essential to have accurate data on the vertical and horizontal clearances of overhead infrastructure objects along the highway. Accurate clearance data is used for routing oversized transports, infrastructure reconstruction, maintenance and settling legal claims after incidents. The proposed method takes a point cloud of an infrastructure object as input, and as output provides the user with a concise overview of the horizontal and vertical clearances of the object. A point cloud of a highway overpass or gantry is segmented into the different clusters relevant for determining the clearances. The discrete points in these clusters will then be used to approximate their surfaces with B-splines. Subsequently the minimal clearances can be estimated. These clearances are estimated at certain pre-specified locations according to guidelines from the highway authority. The paper also includes a comparison of the inferred clearances from the point clouds with archived measurements performed by third party contractors. For this case study, a Dutch highway section containing 50 gantries and 20 viaducts is selected. Along this stretch of highway the clearances are estimated. The estimated clearances for each structure are then compared with archived in situ measurements. This will give a quantitative analysis of the quality of the estimated clearances. The estimated vertical clearances have an overestimation of 20-30 mm compared to the validation data. The horizontal clearances show a median underestimation of 20 mm.

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Precipitation is an important meteorological indicator that has a direct and significant impact on ecology, agriculture, hydrology, and other vital areas of human health and life. It is therefore essential to monitor variations of this parameter at a global and local scale. To monitor and predict long-term changes in climate elements, Global Circulation Models (GCMs) can provide simulated global-scale climatic processes. Due to the low spatial resolution of these models, downscaling methods are required to convert such large-scale information to regional-scale data for local applications. Among the downscaling methods, the Statistical DownScaling Model (SDSM) and the Artificial Neural Networks (ANNs) are widely used due to their low computational volume and suitable output. These models mainly require training data, and generally, the reanalysis data obtained from the National Center for Environmental Prediction (NCEP) and European Centre for Medium-range Weather Forecasts (ECMWF) are used for this purpose. With an optimal downscaling method, instead of applying the humidity indices extracted from ECMWF data, the outputs of the function-based tropospheric tomography technique obtained from the Global Navigation Satellite System (GNSS) will be used. The reconstructed function-based tropospheric data is then fed to the SDSM and ANN methods used for downscaling. The results of both methods indicate that the tomography can increase the accuracy of the downscaling process by about 20 mm in the wet months of the year. This corresponds to an average improvement of 38% with regard to the root mean square error (RMSE) of the monthly precipitation.

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The performance of the gravimetric geoid models is usually evaluated by comparison of geoid heights with the GNSS/levelling derived geoid. But the GNSS/levelling network can be infected by significant systematic biases and random errors, especially in large and uneven areas. This contribution addresses the challenging problem of the corrector surface development along with the elimination of biases. To this end, fitting an appropriate geometric surface to the GNSS/levelling geoid heights is required, which is accomplished by applying the least squares B-spline approximation theory to the GNSS/levelling data. In addition, the 3D affine transformation is used to detect systematic effects of the GNSS/levelling network compared to a global geoid model. This strategy is applied to the adjustment of the Iranian GNSS/levelling network. A significant tilt is observed across the country ranging from −0.35 m to 0.04 m. The entire study area is divided into four zones and the corrector surfaces are obtained in each zone. The accuracy of three global geoid models, EGM2008, EIGEN-6C4 and SGG-UGM-1, along with that of the Iranian regional geoid model IRG2016, are then investigated based on the raw GNSS/levelling heights and the corrector surfaces. The evaluations show the reliable results regarding the corrector surfaces against the raw data set. All geoid models show their maximum RMSE values of discrepancies in the mountainous zones and their minimum RMSEs in the zones having lower variety in topography. This indicates that the irregular topographies are not well detected by the global models over the study area.

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With the advancement of multi-constellation and multi-frequency global navigation satellite systems (GNSSs), more observations are available for high precision positioning applications. Although there is a lot of progress in the GNSS world, achieving realistic precision of the solution (neither too optimistic nor too pessimistic) is still an open problem. Weighting among different GNSS systems requires a realistic stochastic model for all observations to achieve the best linear unbiased estimation (BLUE) of unknown parameters in multi-GNSS data processing mode. In addition, the correct integer ambiguity resolution (IAR) becomes crucial in shortening the Time-To-Fix (TTF) in RTK, especially in challenging environmental conditions. In general, it is required to estimate various variances for observation types, consider the correlation between different observables, and compensate for the satellite elevation dependence of the observable precision. Quality control of GNSS signals, such as GPS, GLONASS, Galileo, and BeiDou can be performed by processing a zero or short baseline double difference pseudorange and carrier phase observations using the least-squares variance component estimation (LS-VCE). The efficacy of this method is investigated using real multi-GNSS data sets collected by the Trimble NETR9, SEPT POLARX5, and LEICA GR30 receivers. The results show that the standard deviation of observations depends on the system and the observable type in which a particular receiver could have the best performance. We also note that the estimated variances and correlations among different observations are also dependent on the receiver type. It is because the approaches utilized for the recovery techniques differ from one type of receiver to another kind. The reliability of IAR will improve if a realistic stochastic model is applied in single or multi-GNSS data processing. According to the results, for the data sets considered, a realistic stochastic model can increase the computed empirical success rate to 100% in multi-GNSS as well as a single system. As mentioned previously, the realistic precision of the solution can be achieved with a realistic stochastic model. However, using the estimated stochastic model, in fact, leads to better precision and accuracy for the estimated baseline components, up to 39% in multi-GNSS.

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Until now, RTK (real-time kinematic) and NRTK (Network-based RTK) have been the most popular cm-level accurate positioning approaches based on Global Navigation Satellite System (GNSS) signals in real-time. The tropospheric delay is a major source of RTK errors, especially for medium and long baselines. This source of error is difficult to quantify due to its reliance on highly variable atmospheric humidity. In this paper, we use the NRTK approach to estimate double-differenced zenith tropospheric delays alongside ambiguities and positions based on a complete set of multi-GNSS data in a sample 6-station network in Europe. The ZTD files published by IGS were used to validate the estimated ZTDs. The results confirmed a good agreement, with an average Root Mean Squares Error (RMSE) of about 12 mm. Although multiplying the unknowns makes the mathematical model less reliable in correctly fixing integer ambiguities, adding a priori interpolated ZTD as quasi-observations can improve positioning accuracy and Integer Ambiguity Resolution (IAR) performance. In this work, weighted least-squares (WLS) were performed using the interpolation of ZTD values of near reference stations of the IGS network. When using a well-known Kriging interpolation, the weights depend on the semivariogram, and a higher network density is required to obtain the correct covariance function. Hence, we used a simple interpolation strategy, which minimized the impact of altitude variability within the network. Compared to standard RTK where ZTD is assumed to be unknown, this technique improves the positioning accuracy by about 50%. It also increased the success rate for IAR by nearly 1.@en