Study of the atmospheric pressure loading signal in very long baseline interferometry observations

By Leonid Petrov, Jean-Paul Boy. 2003

320 citations recorded by the source corpus.

[1] Redistribution of air masses due to atmospheric circulation causes loading deformation of the Earth's crust, which can be as large as 20 mm for the vertical component and 3 mm for horizontal components. Rigorous computation of site displacements caused by pressure loading requires knowledge of the surface pressure field over the entire Earth surface. A procedure for computing three-dimensional displacements of geodetic sites of interest using a 6 hourly pressure field from the National Centers for Environmental Prediction numerical weather models and the Ponte and Ray [2002] model of atmospheric tides is presented. We investigated possible error sources and found that the errors of our pressure loading time series are below the 15% level. We validated our model by estimating the admittance factors of the pressure loading time series using a data set of 3.5 million very long baseline interferometry observations from 1980 to 2002. The admittance factors averaged over all sites are 0.95 ± 0.02 for the vertical displacement and 1.00 ± 0.07 for the horizontal displacements. For the first time, horizontal displacements caused by atmospheric pressure loading have been detected. The closeness of these admittance factors to unity allows us to conclude that on average, our model quantitatively agrees with the observations within the error budget of the model. At the same time we found that the model is not accurate for several stations that are near a coast or in mountain regions. We conclude that our model is suitable for routine data reduction of space geodesy observations.

Subfields: Atmospheric Science, Global and Planetary Change, Oceanography

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/be1dda3d73be4cae8d8a76144e1e9727dbf041fd

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Citations in the corpus

The third realization of the International Celestial Reference Frame by very long baseline interferometry (2020, methodology): “Ocean loading displacements were obtained from the TPXO.7.2 model (Egbert & Erofeeva 2002), supplemented with the FES99 model (Lefèvre et al. 2002) for the long-period Ssa tide, while those due to atmospheric pressure loading (both tidal and non-tidal) come from the APLO model (Petrov & Boy 2004).”
Improved Earth Oblateness Rate Reveals Increased Ice Sheet Losses and Mass‐Driven Sea Level Rise (2019, background): “Additional station position corrections account for the solid Earth tide and ocean tidal loading (Petit & Luzum, 2010), and atmospheric loading (Petrov & Boy, 2004).”
Precision Orbit Determination Standards for the Jason Series of Altimeter Missions (2010, methodology): “The models used included the NCEP-6hr reanalysis and ECMWF-3hr operational surface pressure fields (Kalnay et al. 1996; Petrov and Boy 2004; Klinker et al. 2000), the Toulouse Unstructured Grid Ocean model (T-UGO, or MOG-2D Follow-on), to model the barotropic oceanic mass variations (Carrère and…”
THE SECOND REALIZATION OF THE INTERNATIONAL CELESTIAL REFERENCE FRAME BY VERY LONG BASELINE INTERFEROMETRY (2015, background): “Pressure loading corrections have been shown to improve VLBI baseline repeatability [Petrov & Boy, 2004], therefore it is desirable to use pressure loading for the ICRF2 solution.”
Troposphere mapping functions for GPS and very long baseline interferometry from European Centre for Medium‐Range Weather Forecasts operational analysis data (2006, methodology): “Atmospheric loading parameters are obtained from Petrov and Boy [2004] , and ocean loading corrections are calculated from Scherneck and Bos [2002] using the CSR4.0 ocean tide model by Eanes [1994].”
Atmospheric pressure loading corrections applied to GPS data at the observation level (2005, background): “[3] Are 24-hour averages of ATML sufficient for correcting for the signal in GPS height time series or should one correct for the deformation at the observation level? Could one apply a model for the ATML tidal deformations at the observation level and then just add a daily-averaged correction for t”