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Earth orientation parameters estimated from VLBI during the CONT11 campaign

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Abstract

In this paper we investigate the accuracy of the earth orientation parameters (EOP) estimated from the continuous VLBI campaign CONT11. We first estimated EOP with daily resolution and compared these to EOP estimated from GNSS data. We find that the WRMS differences are about 31 \(\upmu \)as for polar motion and 7 \(\upmu \)s for length of day. This is about the precision we could expect, based on Monte Carlo simulations and the results of the previous CONT campaigns. We also estimated EOP with hourly resolution to study the sub-diurnal variations. The results confirm the results of previous studies, showing that the current IERS model for high-frequency EOP variations does not explain all the sub-diurnal variations seen in the estimated time series. We then compared our results to various empirical high-frequency EOP models. However, we did not find that any of these gave any unambiguous improvement. Several simulations testing the impact of various aspects of, e.g. the observing network were also made. For example, we made simulations assuming that all CONT11 stations were equipped with fast VLBI2010 antennas. We found that the WRMS error decreased by about a factor five compared to the current VLBI system. Furthermore, the simulations showed that it is very important to have a homogenous global distribution of the stations for achieving the highest precision for the EOP.

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Notes

  1. http://ivscc.gsfc.nasa.gov.

  2. Available from http://lupus.gsfc.nasa.gov/sess/master11.html, Accessed 13 Jun 2013.

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Acknowledgments

We are grateful to all the stations involved in the CONT11 campaign, to the IVS for providing the VLBI data, and to the IGS for providing the GNSS results. We also like to thank the three anonymous reviewers for their comments which helped to improve the paper.

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  1. Helmholtz Centre Potsdam, GFZ German Research Centre for Geosciences, Telegrafenberg A17, Potsdam, Germany

    Tobias Nilsson, Robert Heinkelmann, Maria Karbon, Virginia Raposo-Pulido, Benedikt Soja & Harald Schuh

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  1. Tobias Nilsson
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  2. Robert Heinkelmann
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Correspondence to Tobias Nilsson.

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Nilsson, T., Heinkelmann, R., Karbon, M. et al. Earth orientation parameters estimated from VLBI during the CONT11 campaign. J Geod 88, 491–502 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00190-014-0700-5

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