The goal of the NEW-ARGENT (NumErical Weather prediction improvement through the Assimilation of Real-time Gnss Estimated Non-isotropic Troposphere, all acronyms are in section B1.4) project is to improve the short-term (from 30 minutes to 12 h) prediction of convective and severe weather events over Italy through the GNSS (GPS, Galileo, Glonass and Beidou) tropospheric delays assimilation and to design an overall procedure and raise it at a pre-operational stage.
NEW-ARGENT finds its motivation in the following considerations.
It is well known since some decades ago that GNSS can supply information about the water vapor content in the troposphere, and this result is routinely got in high-precision GNSS data processing for geodetic and geophysical monitoring purposes in order to mitigate as much as possible the effect of the troposphere onto the positions of points on the Earth surface. Also, it has already been prediction. Anyway, the adopted models and procedures are oriented to get the best positions, generally on a daily basis, and not the best estimates of the water vapor content in the troposphere to routinely improve weather predictions.