Surface loading on GNSS stations in Africa

Surface loading on GNSS stations in Africa

Usifoh Saturday E^1,2,3, Nhung Le Thi^1,2, Benjamin Männel¹, Pierre Sakic¹, Dodo Joseph³, Harald Schuh^1,2
1GFZ German Research Centre for Geosciences, Potsdam, Germany, ²Institut für Geodäsie und Geoinformationstechnik Technische Universität, Berlin, Germany, ³Centre for Geodesy and Geodynamics, Toro, Bauchi State, Nigeria.

 Corresponding author: parker@gfz-potsdam.de

Abstract

The global navigation satellite systems (GNSS) have revolutionalized the ability to monitor the Earth’s system related to different types of natural processes. This includes tectonic and volcanic deformation, earthquake-related displacements, redistribution of oceanic and atmospheric mass, and changes in the continental water storage. As loading affects the GNSS cordinates, we investigated the effect and assessed the impact of applying dedicated corrections provided by the Earth System Modeling group of German Research Center for Geosciences (GFZ). However, loading caused by mass redistribution results in displacement, predominantly with seasonal periods. Significant temporal changes in mass redistribution (e.g caused by climate change) will result to further trends in the station coordinate time series.

In this contribution, we will compare the PPP coordinate time series with the loading-corrected PPP time series by looking at the amplitude and the correlation between the GNSS time series and the model corrections. Also we will compare the PPP coordinate time series with the loading time series by assessing the RMS reduction and change of amplitude.The result shows that loading-induced displacement varies considerably among GNSS stations and applying corrections to the derived time series has favourable impacts on the reduction in the non-linear motion in GNSS height time series of the African stations.