The Effect of Urbanization and Associated Climate Change on GNSS Positioning: A Case Study in Addis Ababa City, Ethiopia

Fast urbanization and associated micro-climate change in urban settings affect the day-to-day activities of contemporary dwellers. This can also affect the positioning of points using the Global Navigation Satellite System(GNSS) technique. To investigate the association between urbanization, change in the urban climate, and long-term change in the propagation of GNSS signal through the atmosphere in Addis Ababa City, the data from the International GNSS Service (IGS) station ADIS was processed for the years from 2008 to 2019. Similarly, the built-up area expansion, vegetation cover change, and land surface temperature were computed from 2005 to 2019. For all the data sets, the low-frequency variations are then estimated using a polynomial fitting technique, through the least-square approach. The comparison of the resulting long-wavelength data, using the linear correlation technique showed that there is a very high correlation between the long-term changes in the Up direction of the IGS station ADIS, and the built-up expansion, the vegetation coverage changes, and land surface temperature with correlation values − 0.9227, +  0.9489, and − 0.9862 respectively. Even though, the level of impact has not been quantified a conclusion is drawn that urbanization and its impact on climate change have an effect on the positional information of a station.