I am currently attending the Ocean Platform Workshop in Boulder, CO. There have been a great collection of speakers on fascinating topics.
There has been a lot of discussion regarding formats for real-time streaming of GPS data. I'm not talking about NMEA messages, but rather, either something akin to RINEX format or RTCM messages. These latter formats provide sufficient information for re-processing of raw satellite observables for a greatly enhanced solution. RINEX is the best format for GPS data logging, having all the necessary components for complete post-processing. However RTCM is more commonly streamed and there is a IP protocol for this called NTRIP. I'm not sure where the spec is for NTRIP, but broadcasters of RTCM over IP are called Casters and a list can be found here and here.
NTRIP has the potential to provide a great solution to scientific operations in the Arctic where regional or global differential corrections are not typically available or receivable. One could capture RTCM via NTRIP through an Iridium phone link. For many real-time applications updates every few minutes or hours would be sufficient. For example the Ice Breaker Healy’s POS/MV could receive corrections that might include the rapid predicted orbital corrections, a least-squares estimate of satellite clock offsets and perhaps a global model of ionosphere delays. Corrections for delays incurred in the troposphere would require real-time monitoring of Arctic Buoy data for temperature and pressure data which could be fed into a model, since local differential corrections requiring a base-station would not be possible. Still, in the Arctic I would expect the dry component of the tropospheric delay to far out-weigh the wet component (with little water vapor in the air) producing a quite good estimate from a model alone.
These types of corrections are already provided by commercial outfits like C&C Technologies with their CNav system. But they broadcast the corrections via INMARSAT which doesn’t transmit above about 75N Latitude. Plus a subscription costs $10k/year. They have an arrangement with JPL to use their GYPSY (GPS Inferred Positioning System ad Orbital Simulation Software) algorithm. However other algorithms are available.
At any rate, it seems the pieces exist (input data, models and algorithms) to pieces together the required components to provide Healy with RTCM corrections via NTRIP.