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High-rate precise point positioning (PPP) to measure seismic wave motions: an experimental comparison of GPS PPP with inertial measurement units

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Abstract

High-rate GPS has been widely used to construct displacement waveforms and to invert for source parameters of earthquakes. Almost all works on internal and external evaluation of high-rate GPS accuracy are based on GPS relative positioning. We build an experimental platform to externally evaluate the accuracy of 50-Hz PPP displacement waveforms. Since the shake table allows motion in any of six degrees of freedom, we install an inertial measurement unit (IMU) to measure the attitude of the platform and transform the IMU displacements into the GPS coordinate system. The experimental results have shown that high-rate PPP can produce absolute horizontal displacement waveforms at the accuracy of 2–4 mm and absolute vertical displacement waveforms at the sub-centimeter level of accuracy within a short period of time. The significance of the experiments indicates that high-rate PPP is capable of detecting absolute seismic displacement waveforms at the same high accuracy as GPS relative positioning techniques, but requires no fixed datum station. We have also found a small scaling error of IMU and a small time offset of misalignment between high-rate PPP and IMU displacement waveforms by comparing the amplitudes of and cross-correlating both the displacement waveforms.

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Acknowledgments

The authors are very grateful to the reviewers, the associate editor, Prof. J. Kusche, and the Editor-in-Chief, Prof. R. Klees, for their very constructive comments and for bringing a few articles on the topic, just published or in press, to the attention of the authors while this paper was under review, which have resulted in a significant improvement of the presentation of the paper. They are also grateful to one of the reviewers for polishing the English of the text. This work is partially supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Projects 41104024, 41174028 and 41231174) and the 111 Project B07037, PRC Ministry of Education. Finally, the authors are also grateful to Prof. T. Shibutani, a seismologist at Kyoto University, for personal communication on 7 Nov 2012 about frequency range of strong motions in the case of large earthquakes.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Disaster Prevention Research Institute, Kyoto University, Uji, Kyoto, 611-0011, Japan

    Peiliang Xu & Takashi Yanagidani

  2. GNSS Research Center, Wuhan University, Wuhan, 430071, People’s Republic of China

    Chuang Shi, Rongxin Fang, Jingnan Liu, Xiaoji Niu & Quan Zhang

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  1. Peiliang Xu
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  2. Chuang Shi
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  7. Takashi Yanagidani
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Correspondence to Chuang Shi.

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Xu, P., Shi, C., Fang, R. et al. High-rate precise point positioning (PPP) to measure seismic wave motions: an experimental comparison of GPS PPP with inertial measurement units. J Geod 87, 361–372 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00190-012-0606-z

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