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• The accuracy of MODIS IR PWV is poor. • The GPS station and MODIS pixel points do not coincide completely in point position. • The problems of spatial interpolation and calibration model are considered in MODIS calibration process. • Compared with the original MODIS IR PWV, the accuracy of the new model is greatly improved in all aspects. • MODIS IR PWV of the new model is in good agreement with GPS PWV. The monitoring of precipitable water vapor (PWV) is of significant importance for meteorological research and rainstorm prediction. The moderate resolution imaging spectroradiometer (MODIS) is one of the most widely used remote sensing PWV instruments aboard the Terra and Aqua satellites. The main objective of this study is to develop a fused inverse distance weighting and the Fourier transform model (FIDWFT) to calibrate MODIS Infrared (IR) PWV. In this research, one year of ground observation data from 17 GPS stations were utilized to evaluate the accuracy of MODIS IR PWV in Hong Kong. Initially, the PWV obtained by one radiosonde was used to verify the GPS PWV. Comparison between GPS and radiosonde showed good agreement with an R-squared of 0.97. After the estimation of GPS PWV in the study area was evaluated, MODIS IR products in the study area were extracted for evaluation. The comparison between MODIS and GPS showed that the R-squared is 0.81 and the mean bias (MB) is −1.60 mm. Considering the spatial interpolation and calibration problems of MODIS products, new model used an inverse distance weighting method to make MODIS IR PWV and GPS PWV completely coincide in space, and fifteen MODIS pixel points were selected for interpolation. Then the MODIS IR PWV was calibrated by GPS PWV using Fourier transform model. Results showed that compared with the MODIS IR PWV before calibration, the R-squared increases from 0.81 to 0.94, the root mean square error decreases from 8.72 mm to 4.98 mm, and the MB decreases from −1.60 mm to −0.83 mm. Therefore, the method is feasible to estimate MODIS IR water vapor, and it achieves better results. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Global Navigation Satellite Systems (GNSS) tomography plays an important role in the monitoring and tracking of the tropospheric water vapor. In this study, a new approach for improving the node-based GNSS tomography is proposed, which makes a trade-off between the real observed region and the complexity of the discretization of the tomographic region. To obtain dynamically the approximate observed region, the convex hull algorithm and minimum bounding box algorithm are used at each tomographic epoch. This new approach can dynamically define the tomographic model for all types of study areas based on the GNSS data. The performance of the new approach is tested by comparing it against the common node-based GNSS tomographic approach. Test data in May 2015 are obtained from the Hong Kong GNSS network to build the tomographic models and the radiosonde data as a reference are used for validating the quality of the new approach. The experimental results show that the root-mean-square errors of the new approach, in most cases, have a 38 percent improvement and the values of standard deviation reduce to over 43 percent compared with the common approach. The results indicate that the new approach is applicable to the node-based GNSS tomography. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]