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Improvement of GPS/acoustic seafloor positioning precision through controlling the ship’s track line

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Abstract

The precision of GPS/acoustic seafloor positioning was improved by introducing a hull-mounted onboard system in March 2008, which allows us to conduct acoustic ranging measurements with the vessel sailing along the pre-determined track lines, while the early system before 2008 could only adopt the uncontrollable drifting observation. The continuity of the positioning results due to the transition was first confirmed through the comparison between results from sailing and drifting observations conducted in parallel. Using the data acquired for about 3 years since 2008, the repeatability of the determined position for the sailing observation was evaluated to be about 2 cm in root mean squares in the horizontal component, significantly better than that for the early drifting observation. The improvement of positioning precision probably resulted from the improvement of geometric distribution of acoustic ranging data by controlling the track lines. It was also shown that the sailing observation allows to obtain reliable results with a smaller amount of data. Comparison between the results in different sea regions suggests that positioning precision is better in the region along the Nankai Trough than in the region along the Japan Trench, probably because of the complicated acoustic velocity structure of seawater often observed in the latter. Furthermore, the precision of height determination was also improved, which leads us to expect that vertical crustal movement will be detectable in the future through accumulation of data as well as further technology development.

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Acknowledgments

We thank the Geospatial Information Authority of Japan for providing us with the GPS data as terrestrial reference points for kinematic GPS analysis. We also thank Oscar L. Colombo of the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center for providing us with the kinematic GPS software ‘IT’ (Colombo et al. 2000). We also wish to express our gratitude to Akira Asada and Masashi Mochizuki of University of Tokyo for their continuous collaboration, and Hiromi Fujimoto, Norihito Umino, Toru Matsuzawa, Ryota Hino, Motoyuki Kido, Yukihito Osada and Takeshi Iinuma of Tohoku University for their support and valuable comments. A lot of staff members of the Hydrographic and Oceanographic Department of Japan Coast Guard, including the crew of S/Vs Meiyo and Kaiyo, have been supporting us in observations and data analyses. Comments from the anonymous reviewers have improved the manuscript substantially. Some figures were produced with the GMT software (Wessel and Smith 1991).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Hydrographic and Oceanographic Department, Japan Coast Guard, 2-5-18 Aomi, Koto-ku, Tokyo, 135-0064, Japan

    M. Sato, M. Fujita, Y. Matsumoto, H. Saito, T. Ishikawa & T. Asakura

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  1. M. Sato
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  2. M. Fujita
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  3. Y. Matsumoto
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  4. H. Saito
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  5. T. Ishikawa
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  6. T. Asakura
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Correspondence to M. Sato.

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Sato, M., Fujita, M., Matsumoto, Y. et al. Improvement of GPS/acoustic seafloor positioning precision through controlling the ship’s track line. J Geod 87, 825–842 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00190-013-0649-9

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00190-013-0649-9

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