Effect of antenna snow intrusion on vertical GPS position time series in Antarctica

Abstract Vertical surface displacements from continuous Global Positioning System (GPS) stations often show strong seasonal signals, which in some cases may be associated with surface mass loading, including hydrological, and non-tidal oceanic and atmospheric loading. In Antarctica, many GPS station...

Full description

Bibliographic Details
Published in:Journal of Geodesy
Main Authors: Koulali, A., Clarke, P. J.
Other Authors: Newcastle University
Format: Article in Journal/Newspaper
Language:English
Published: Springer Science and Business Media LLC 2020
Subjects:
Online Access:http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s00190-020-01403-6
https://link.springer.com/content/pdf/10.1007/s00190-020-01403-6.pdf
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s00190-020-01403-6/fulltext.html
Description
Summary:Abstract Vertical surface displacements from continuous Global Positioning System (GPS) stations often show strong seasonal signals, which in some cases may be associated with surface mass loading, including hydrological, and non-tidal oceanic and atmospheric loading. In Antarctica, many GPS stations show vertical motions in phase with seasonal snow accumulation changes, but these variations cannot be fully explained with snow load variations between seasons. Instead we show, for many sites in Antarctica, that a significant component of the annual cycle in vertical GPS coordinates time series may be related to snow/ice inside antennas causing as an artefact apparent seasonal variation, with amplitudes of up to 4 mm. We present a method based on the Empirical Mode Decomposition (EMD) algorithm to remove this artefact signal. The corrected GPS time series show an improvement in the agreement with displacements predicted by elastic modelling using GRACE-derived surface mass loads.