Karina Wilgan

G Geodesy

The 2020 Division Outstanding Early Career Scientist Award is awarded to Karina Wilgan for the development of new methods for the integration of GNSS delays, meteorological observations and numerical weather prediction models for applications in InSAR and GNSS.

Karina Wilgan has been conducting important research for space geodesy that is related to the homogenisation and unification of troposphere delays obtained from GNSS and InSAR observations at different spatial and time resolutions, with troposphere delays obtained from numerical weather prediction models and meteorological observations. She has successfully employed least-squares collocation methods to integrate and assimilate GNSS zenith total delays and horizontal gradients with the corresponding delays derived from meteorological observations.

Those integrated models improved the repeatability of GNSS station coordinates, shortened the convergence time in precise point positioning (PPP) solutions, and enhanced the quality of InSAR-based surface deformation results. The research conducted by Wilgan significantly contributes to the assimilation of meteorological measurements and weather models with GNSS-derived delays for better exploitation of high-precision satellite geodesy data and, finally, for deriving enhanced and state-of-the-art GNSS and InSAR results.