Accuracy and error sources --- Atmospheric effects

Inconsistencies of atmospheric conditions affect the speed of the GPS signals as they pass through the Earth's atmosphere, especially the ionosphere. Correcting these errors is a significant challenge to improving GPS position accuracy. These effects are smallest when the satellite is directly overhead and become greater for satellites nearer the horizon since the path through the atmosphere is longer (see air mass). Once the receiver's approximate location is known, a mathematical model can be used to estimate and compensate for these errors.

Because ionospheric delay affects the speed of microwave signals differently depending on their frequency — a characteristic known as dispersion - delays measured on two more frequency bands can be used to measure dispersion, and this measurement can be then be used to estimate the delay at each frequency. Some military and expensive survey-grade civilian receivers measure the different delays in the L1 and L2 frequencies to measure atmospheric dispersion, and apply a more precise correction. This can be done in civilian receivers without decrypting the P(Y) signal carried on L2, by tracking the carrier wave instead of the modulated code. To facilitate this on lower cost receivers, a new civilian code signal on L2, called L2C, was added to the Block IIR-M satellites, which was first launched in 2005. It allows a direct comparison of the L1 and L2 signals using the coded signal instead of the carrier wave.

The effects of the ionosphere generally change slowly, and can be averaged over time. The effects for any particular geographical area can be easily calculated by comparing the GPS-measured position to a known surveyed location. This correction is also valid for other receivers in the same general location. Several systems send this information over radio or other links to allow L1-only receivers to make ionospheric corrections. The ionospheric data are transmitted via satellite in Satellite Based Augmentation Systems such as WAAS, which transmits it on the GPS frequency using a special pseudo-random noise sequence (PRN), so only one receiver and antenna are required.

Humidity also causes a variable delay, resulting in errors similar to ionospheric delay, but occurring in the troposphere. This effect both is more localized and changes more quickly than ionospheric effects, and is not frequency dependent. These traits make precise measurement and compensation of humidity errors more difficult than ionospheric effects.

Changes in receiver altitude also change the amount of delay, due to the signal passing through less of the atmosphere at higher elevations. Since the GPS receiver computes its approximate altitude, this error is relatively simple to correct, either by applying a function regression or correlating margin of atmospheric error to ambient pressure using a barometric altimeter.