Abstract
Global Navigation Satellite Systems (GNSS) enable the determination of station displacements, which are essential to understanding geophysical processes and establishing terrestrial reference frames. Unfortunately, GNSS station position time series exhibit spatially and temporally correlated noise, hindering their contribution to geophysical and geodetic applications. While temporal correlations are commonly accounted for, a strategy for modeling spatial correlations is still lacking. Therefore, this study proposes a diagnosis of the spatial correlations of the white and flicker noise components of GNSS position time series, using the global Nevada Geodetic Laboratory dataset. This analysis reveals different spatial correlation patterns for white and flicker noise and the superposition of three distinct spatial correlation regimes (large-scale, short-scale and station-specific), providing insight into the noise sources. We show, in particular, that about 70% of flicker noise corresponds to large-scale variations possibly attributable to orbit modeling errors. We also evidence an increase in the spatial correlations of white noise at distances below 50 km, most pronounced in the vertical component, where 50% of the white noise appears to be driven by short-scale effects—possibly tropospheric delay mismodeling.
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Data availability
All the position time series this work uses are available at http://geodesy.unr.edu. The non-tidal loading deformation products this work also uses are available at http://rz-vm115.gfz-potsdam.de:8080/repository. The list of discontinuities identified in this study is provided in the Supplementary Materials.
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Acknowledgements
K. Gobron is grateful to the Centre National d’Étude Spatiales (CNES) for the postdoctoral fellowship that allowed him to realize this work. The authors thank the associate editor Anna Klos and two anonymous reviewers for their constructive comments.
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KG and PR initiated the study. KG and PR carried out the numerical experiments. All authors discussed the results. KG wrote the initial manuscript draft. All authors contributed to the final manuscript.
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Gobron, K., Rebischung, P., Chanard, K. et al. Anatomy of the spatiotemporally correlated noise in GNSS station position time series. J Geod 98, 34 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00190-024-01848-z
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00190-024-01848-z