Construction of models of temperature dependent variations in the position of IGS/NGS stations located on buildings and other structures. Case Washington, USA

Abstract In this work, a study of a compact group of five continuously operating GNSS stations was carried out. It based on the previously obtained results of studies of the effect of thermal compression-expansion of buildings as foundations of geodetic stations, conditions for the manifestation of this effect in variations of geodetic stations positions and properties of these variations. The study examined seasonal variations in relative positions of stations in this network. Relative GPS positioning on very short baselines that has very high sensitivity was used for the study. Based on the analysis of the properties of the time series obtained for all possible baselines in this network, it is shown that the seasonal variations observed in these time series reflect the influence of changes in ambient temperature. From point of view of the problem being solved, this group of stations has an important property: all stations are installed on the roofs of buildings, with almost all station located near the edges of the roofs, and only one station located near the middle of the roof. Using this property, models of variations of these stations positions under influence of this effect were constructed without the use of external reference stations. The constructed high-precision models are suitable for practical use – predicting actual positions of these stations in arbitrary observation epochs. The possibilities of “thermal tie” – the dissemination of thermal dependence parameters from known stations to new ones – are considered.