Geocenter coordinates and Earth rotation parameters from GPS-only, GLONASS-only, Galileo-only, and the combined GPS+GLONASS+Galileo solutions

The European GNSS – Galileo can be considered as fully serviceable with 24 active satellites in space since late 2018. Galileo satellites have a different revolution period than that of GPS and GLONASS, and moreover, two additional Galileo satellites are orbiting in an eccentric orbit which helps to decorrelate some global geodetic parameters.

This contribution shows the results from Galileo-only, GPS-only, GLONASS-only, and the combined multi-GNSS solutions with a focus on Earth rotation parameters and geocenter coordinates based on the 3-year solution. We discuss the system-specific issues in individual GNSS-derived series and resonances between satellite revolution periods and Earth rotation. We found that the Galileo-based and GLONASS-based parameters are inherently influenced by the spurious signals at the frequencies which arise from the combination of the satellite revolution period and the Earth’s rotation, e.g. 3.4 days for Galileo and 3.9 days for GLONASS. On the other hand, we observe a systematic drift of GPS-based UT1-UTC values with a magnitude of 8.1 ms/year which is due to the revolution period of the GPS satellites which is equal to half of the sidereal day and causes a deep resonance. For Galileo, the UT1-UTC drift is sixteen times smaller than that of GPS and equals just 0.5 ms/year. GLONASS-derived pole coordinates and geocenter coordinates show large spurious offsets with respect GPS and Galileo solutions, as well as with respect to the IERS-C04-14 series and Satellite Laser Ranging data. GLONASS-specific problems can be partially reduced by applying a box-wing orbit model and by reducing the number of estimated empirical orbit parameters. The quality of Galileo-derived geocenter coordinates is comparable to the GPS-based results. The Galileo-derived polar motion is affected by systematic errors in receiver and satellite antenna offsets. The best results of geocenter coordinates and Earth rotation parameters can be obtained from the combined GPS+Galileo+GLONASS solutions, however, some system-specific issues still remain in the combination.