Abstract
Temporal change of surface loadings due to the mass redistribution of the fluid envelope of the Earth, deform the Earth and cause the coordinate changes of the observation sites. We estimated the crustal displacements due to the atmospheric load (AL), the non-tidal ocean load (NTOL), the continental water load (CWL) and the snow load (SL) influences using the several meteorological data and model. And then, we tried to eliminate the load influences from the GPS site coordinate time series and global Satellite Laser Ranging (SLR) analysis.
As the time series of GPS site coordinates, we employed a solution of IGS which was calculated by using GIPSY-OASIS II (Heflin et al., 2002) by the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) and the routine solution of GEONET called F2 solution which was calculated by Bernese version 4.2 software (Hatanaka et al., 2003) by the Geographical Survey Institute. To eliminate periodic signals of the loading effects, we calculated
Corrected GPS = GPS – ( Load + Load + . . . . . + Load )
The results show that a combination of atmospheric, non-tidal ocean, continental water, and snow loads can eliminate about 20% of the annual signal in the coordinate time series for vertical components. We applied the loading correction to the data of the 1997 Bungo channel slow slip event and showed that the correction can benefit the analysis of such a non-periodic event.
Next, we applied the time series of NTOL and CWL to precise SLR analysis that used the ‘concerto’ program version 4 developed by the National Institute of Information and Communications Technology (NICT). The LAGEOS orbit analysis reveals that the Estimating the Circulation and Climate of the Ocean (ECCO) model makes the root mean square (RMS) of the range residual 0.2% smaller, and that the CWL makes it 0.8% smaller, compared with the case where loading displacement is neglected. On the other hand, with the NTOL derived from Topex/Poseidon altimetry data, the SLR orbit fit is not improved.
