Sea level trend over Malaysian seas from multi-mission satellite altimetry and vertical land motion corrected tidal data

Rise in sea levels is one of the disastrous effects of climate change. A relatively small increase in sea level could affect natural coastal systems. In a study of long-term changes in sea level and measurements of postglacial rebound, monitoring vertical land motion (VLM) is of crucial interest. This study presents an approach to estimate precise sea level trends based on a combination of multi-sensor techniques in the Malaysian region over 19?years. In this study, satellite altimeters (SALT) were used to derive absolute sea levels (ASLs). Tide gauge (TG) stations along the coast of Malaysia were utilised to derive the rate of relative sea levels using sea level changes and VLMs. To obtain ASL at TGs, VLM at these stations were computed using Global Positioning System (GPS), Persistent Scatterer Interferometric Synthetic Aperture Radar (PS InSAR), and SALT minus TG. The computed VLMs mostly show similarities in signs rather than magnitude. The findings from the multi-sensor techniques showed that regional sea level trends ranged from 2.65?±?0.86?mm/yr to 6.03?±?0.79?mm/yr for chosen sub-areas, with an overall mean of 4.47?±?0.71?mm/yr and overall subsidence. This information is expected to be valuable for a wide variety of climatic applications and for studying environmental issues related to flooding and global warming in Malaysia.     

GPS用于导弹轨道测量的研究

根据给定某型号导弹的技术参数，综合考虑了各种因素，对该导弹飞行过程中弹上接收GPS卫星的情况进行了模拟和分析，从而论证了该导弹利用GPS作为外测手段的可行性。     

A study of GPS ionospheric scintillations observed at Shenzhen

Ionospheric scintillation variations are studied using GPS measurements at the low latitude station of Shenzhen (22.59°N, 113.97°E), situated under the northern crest of the equatorial anomaly region, from the Chinese Meridian Project. The results are presented for data collected during the current phase of rising solar activity (low to high solar activity) from December 2010 to April 2014. The results show that GPS scintillation events were largely a nighttime phenomenon during the whole observation period. Scintillation events mainly occurred along the inner edge of the northern crest of the equatorial anomaly in China. The occurrence of scintillations in different sectors of the sky was also investigated, and the results revealed that it is more likely for the scintillations to be observed in the west sector of the sky above Shenzhen. During the present period of study, a total number of 512 total electron content (TEC) depletions and 460 lock loss events were observed. In addition, both of these events are likely to increase during periods of high solar activity, especially because the strong scintillations are often simultaneously accompanied by TEC depletions and lock losses by GPS receivers.     

Displacement monitoring performance of relative positioning and Precise Point Positioning (PPP) methods using simulation apparatus

Besides the classical geodetic methods, GPS (Global Positioning System) based positioning methods are widely used for monitoring crustal, structural, ground etc., deformations in recent years. Currently, two main GPS positioning methods are used: Relative and Precise Point Positioning (PPP) methods. It is crucial to know which amount of displacement can be detected with these two methods in order to inform their usability according to the types of deformation. Therefore, this study conducted to investigate horizontal and vertical displacement monitoring performance and capability of determining the direction of displacements of both methods using a developed displacement simulator apparatus. For this purpose, 20 simulated displacement tests were handled. Besides the 24?h data sets, 12?h, 8?h, 4?h and 2?h subsets were considered to examine the influence of short time spans. Each data sets were processed using GAMIT/GLOBK and GIPSY/OASIS scientific software for relative and PPP applications respectively and derived displacements were compared to the simulated (true) displacements. Then statistical significance test was applied. Results of the experiment show that using 24?h data sets, relative method can determine up to 6.0?mm horizontal displacement and 12.3?mm vertical displacement, while PPP method can detect 8.1?mm and 19.2?mm displacements in horizontal and vertical directions respectively. Minimum detected displacements are found to grow larger as time spans are shortened.     

Comparison of convergence time and positioning accuracy among BDS,GPS and BDS/GPS precise point positioning with ambiguity resolution

Precise point positioning (PPP) usually takes about 30?min to obtain centimetre-level accuracy, which greatly limits its application. To address the drawbacks of convergence speed and positioning accuracy, we develop a PPP model with integrated GPS and BDS observations. Based on the method, stations with global coverage are selected to estimate the fractional cycle bias (FCB) of GPS and BDS. The short-term and long-term time series of wide-lane (WL) FCB, and the single day change of narrow-lane (NL) FCB are analysed. It is found that the range of GPS and BDS non-GEO (IGSO and MEO) WL FCB is stable at up to a 30-day-time frame. At times frame of up to 60?days, the stability is reduced a lot. Whether for short-term or long-term, the changes in the BDS GEO WL FCB are large. Moreover, BDS FCB sometimes undergoes a sudden jump. Besides, 17 and 10 stations were used respectively to investigate the convergence speed and positioning errors with six strategies: BDS ambiguity-float PPP (Bfloat), GPS ambiguity-float PPP (Gfloat), BDS/GPS ambiguity-float PPP (BGfloat), BDS ambiguity-fixed PPP (Bfix), GPS ambiguity-fixed (Gfix), and BDS/GPS ambiguity-fixed (BGfix). The average convergence speed of the ambiguity-fixed solution is greatly improved compared with the ambiguity-float solution. In terms of the average convergence time, the Bfloat is the longest and the BGfix is the shortest among these six strategies. Whether for ambiguity-float PPP or ambiguity-fixed PPP, the convergence reduction time in three directions for the combined system is the largest compared with the single BDS. The average RMS value of the Bfix in three directions (easting (E), northing (N), and up (U)) are 2.0?cm, 1.5?cm, and 5.9?cm respectively, while those of the Gfix are 0.8?cm, 0.5?cm, and 1.7?cm. Compared with single system, the BDS/GPS combined ambiguity-fixed system (BGfix) has the fastest convergence speed and the highest accuracy, with average RMS as 0.7?cm, 0.5?cm, and 1.9?cm for the E, N, U components, respectively.     

Estimates of vertical land motion along the southwestern coasts of Turkey from coastal altimetry and tide gauge data

The differences between coastal altimetry and sea level time series of tide gauges in between March 1993 and December 2009 are used to estimate the rates of vertical land motion at three tide gauge locations along the southwestern coasts of Turkey. The CTOH/LEGOS along-track coastal altimetry retrieves altimetric sea level anomalies closer to the coast than the standard along-track altimetry products. However, the use of altimetry very close to the coast is not found to improve the results. On the contrary, the gridded and interpolated AVISO merged product exhibits the best agreement with tide gauge data as it provides the smoothest variability both in space and time compared with along track altimetry data. The Antalya gauge to the south (in the Mediterranean Sea) and the Mentes/Izmir gauge to the west (in the Aegean Sea) both show subsidence while the Bodrum tide gauge to the south (in the Aegean Sea) shows no significant vertical land motion. The results are compared and assessed with three independent geophysical vertical land motion estimates like from GPS. The GIA effect in the region is negligible. The VLM estimates from altimetry and tide gauge data are in good agreement both with GPS derived vertical velocity estimates and those inferred from geological and archaeological investigations.     

Analysis of precipitable water vapor from GPS measurements in Chengdu region: Distribution and evolution characteristics in autumn

The rainfall process of Chengdu region in autumn has obvious regional features. Especially, the night-time rain rate of this region in this season is very high in China. Studying the spatial distribution and temporal variation of regional atmospheric precipitable water vapor (PWV) is important for our understanding of water vapor related processes, such as rainfall, evaporation, convective activity, among others in this area. Since GPS detection technology has the unique characteristics, such as all-weather, high accuracy, high spatial and temporal resolution as well as low cost, tracking and monitoring techniques on water vapor has achieved rapid developments in recent years. With GPS–PWV data at 30-min interval gathered from six GPS observational stations in Chengdu region in two autumns (September 2007–December 2007 and September 2008–December 2008), it is revealed that negative correlations exist between seasonally averaged value of GPS–PWV as well as its variation amplitude and local terrain altitude. The variation of PWV in the upper atmosphere of this region results from the water vapor variation from surface to 850 hPa. With the help of Fast Fourier Transform (FFT), it is found that the autumn PWV in Chengdu region has a multi-scale feature, which includes a seasonal cycle, 22.5 days period (quasi-tri-weekly oscillation). The variation of the GPS–PWV is related to periodical change in the transmitting of the water vapor caused by zonal and meridional wind strengths’ change and to the East Asian monsoon system. According to seasonal variation characteristics, we concluded that the middle October is the critical turning point in PWV content. On a shorter time scale, the relationship between autumn PWV and ground meteorological elements was obtained using the composite analysis approach.     

Near real-time PPP-based monitoring of the ionosphere using dual-frequency GPS/BDS/Galileo data

Ionosphere delay is very important to GNSS observations, since it is one of the main error sources which have to be mitigated even eliminated in order to determine reliable and precise positions. The ionosphere is a dispersive medium to radio signal, so the value of the group delay or phase advance of GNSS radio signal depends on the signal frequency. Ground-based GNSS stations have been used for ionosphere monitoring and modeling for a long time. In this paper we will introduce a novel approach suitable for single-receiver operation based on the precise point positioning (PPP) technique. One of the main characteristic is that only carrier-phase observations are used to avoid particular effects of pseudorange observations. The technique consists of introducing ionosphere ambiguity parameters obtained from PPP filter into the geometry-free combination of observations to estimate ionospheric delays. Observational data from stations that are capable of tracking the GPS/BDS/GALILEO from the International GNSS Service (IGS) Multi-GNSS Experiments (MGEX) network are processed. For the purpose of performance validation, ionospheric delays series derived from the novel approach are compared with the global ionospheric map (GIM) from Ionospheric Associate Analysis Centers (IAACs). The results are encouraging and offer potential solutions to the near real-time ionosphere monitoring.     

Use of varying shell heights derived from ionosonde data in calculating vertical total electron content (TEC) using GPS – New method

The dispersive nature of the ionosphere makes it possible to measure its total electron content (TEC). Thus Global Positioning System, which uses dual-frequency radio signals, is an ideal system to measure TEC. When data from an ionosonde situated in polar region was observed, the height of an approximated thin shell of electrons (shell height) used in GPS studies was seen not to be fixed but rather changing with time. Here we introduce a new method in which we included the varying shell heights derived from the ionosonde to map the slant total electron content from GPS to obtain a more precise vertical total electron content of the ionosphere contrary to some previous methods which used fixed shell heights. In this paper we also compared the ionosonde derived TEC with the GPS derived vertical TEC (vTEC) values. These GPS vTEC values were obtained from GPS slant TEC (sTEC) measurements using both fixed shell height and varying shell heights (from ionosonde measurements). For the polar regions, the varying shell height approach produced better results than the fixed shell height and compared to exponential function, Chapman function seems to be a better function to model the topside ionosphere.     

Long term changes of altimeter range and geophysical corrections at altimetry calibration sites

Accurate sea level trend determination is fundamentally related to calibration of both the instrument as well as to investigate if there are linear trends in the set of standard geophysical and range corrections applied to the sea level observations. Long term changes in range corrections can leak into the observed sea level record and be interpreted as part of the sea level trend. Particularly if these exhibit anomalous trend close to the satellite calibration sites.     

The effect of geocenter motion on Jason-2 orbits and the mean sea level

We compute a series of Jason-2 GPS and SLR/DORIS-based orbits using ITRF2005 and the std0905 standards ( Lemoine et al., 2010). Our GPS and SLR/DORIS orbit data sets span a period of 2 years from cycle 3 (July 2008) to cycle 74 (July 2010). We extract the Jason-2 orbit frame translational parameters per cycle by the means of a Helmert transformation between a set of reference orbits and a set of test orbits. We compare the annual terms of these time-series to the annual terms of two different geocenter motion models where biases and trends have been removed. Subsequently, we include the annual terms of the modeled geocenter motion as a degree-1 loading displacement correction to the GPS and SLR/DORIS tracking network of the POD process. Although the annual geocenter motion correction would reflect a stationary signal in time, under ideal conditions, the whole geocenter motion is a non-stationary process that includes secular trends. Our results suggest that our GSFC Jason-2 GPS-based orbits are closely tied to the center of mass (CM) of the Earth consistent with our current force modeling, whereas GSFC’s SLR/DORIS-based orbits are tied to the origin of ITRF2005, which is the center of figure (CF) for sub-secular scales. We quantify the GPS and SLR/DORIS orbit centering and how this impacts the orbit radial error over the globe, which is assimilated into mean sea level (MSL) error, from the omission of the annual term of the geocenter correction. We find that for the SLR/DORIS std0905 orbits, currently used by the oceanographic community, only the negligence of the annual term of the geocenter motion correction results in a – 4.67 ± 3.40 mm error in the Z-component of the orbit frame which creates 1.06 ± 2.66 mm of systematic error in the MSL estimates, mainly due to the uneven distribution of the oceans between the North and South hemisphere.