This paper captures the signature of heavy rainfall events using the 2-d-/4-d water vapour information derived from GNSS measurement in Hong Kong. The paper first analyzed the relationship between the two-dimensional (2-d) precipitable water vapour (PWV) and rainfall. And then, the four-dimensional (4-d) variations of atmospheric water vapour derived from the GNSS tomographic technique are discussed, especially in the vertical irection. Finally, some interesting results are found and presented.

A troposphere tomographic method has been proposed considering the signal rays penetrating from the side of the area of interest. Given the method above needs the establishment of a unit scale factor model using the radiosonde data at only one location in the research area, an improved approach is proposed by considering the reasonability of modelling data and the diversity of the modelling parameters for building a more accurate unit scale factor model.

By considering the diurnal variations in zenith tropospheric delay (ZTD) and modifying the model expansion function, we developed an improved global empirical ZTD model GZTD2 with higher temporal and spatial resolutions compared to our previous GZTD model. The external validation testing with IGS ZTD data shows the bias and rms for GZTD2 are −0.3 and 3.9 cm respectively, indicating higher accuracy and reliability for geodesy technology compared to GZTD and other commonly used ZTD models.

Existing water vapor tomographic methods use Global Navigation Satellite System (GNSS) signals penetrating the entire research area while they do not consider signals passing through its sides. To solve this issue, an approach which uses GPS data with both signals that pass the side and top of a research area is proposed. The advantages of proposed approach include improving the utilization of existing GNSS observations and increasing the number of voxels crossed by satellite signals.