Modeling environmental bias and computing velocity field from data of Terra Nova Bay GPS network in Antarctica by means of a quasi-observation processing approach

Abstract

Abstract A semi-permanent GPS network of about 30 vertices has been installed at Terra Nova Bay (TNB) near Ross Sea in Antarctica. A permanent GPS station TNB1 based on an Ashtech Z-XII dual frequency P-code GPS receiver with ASH700936D_M Choke Ring Antenna has been mounted on a reinforced concrete pillar built on bedrock since October 1998 and has recorded continuously up to the present. The semi-permanent network has been routinely surveyed every summer using high quality dual frequency GPS receivers with 24 hour sessions at 15 sec rate; data, metadata and solutions will be available to the scientific community at (http://www.geodant.unimore.it). We present the results of a distributed session approach applied to processing GPS data of the TNB GPS network, and based on Gamit/Globk 10.2-3 GPS analysis software. The results are in good agreement with other authors' computations and with many of the theoretical models.