Estimation of Vertical Land Motion at the Tide Gauges in Turkey

This study aims to estimate vertical land motion (VLM) at tide gauges (TG), located in the Mediterranean, Aegean and the Marmara Sea coasts of Turkey, from differences of multimission satellite altimetry and TG sea level time series. Initially, relative sea level trends are estimated at 7 tide gauges stations operated by the Turkish General Directorate of Mapping over the period 2001-2019. Subsequently, absolute sea level trends independent from VLM are computed from multimission satellite altimetry data over the same period. We have computed estimates of linear trends of difference time series between altimetry and tide gauge sea level after removing seasonal signals by harmonic analysis from each time series to estimate the vertical land motion (VLM) at tide gauges. Traditional way of VLM determination at tide gauges is to use GPS@TG or preferably CGPS@TG data. We therefore, processed these GPS data, collected over the years by several TG-GPS campaigns and by continuous GPS stations close to the TG processed by GAMIT/GLOBK software. Subsequently, the GPS and CGPS vertical coordinate time series are used to estimate VLM. These two different VLM estimates, one from GPS and CGPS coordinate time series and other from altimetry-TG sea level time series differences are compared.

 

Keywords: Vertical land motion, Sea Level Changes, Tide gauge, Satellite altimetry, GPS, CGPS