Remote Sensing, Vol. 11, Pages 1389: A Sub-Regional Extraction Method of Common Mode Components from IGS and CMONOC Stations in China (Remote Sensing)

There is always a need to extract more accurate regional common mode component (CMC) series from coordinate time series of Global Positioning System (GPS) stations, which would be of great benefit to describe the deformation features of the Earth’s surface with more reliability. For this purpose, this paper combines all 11 International Global Navigation Satellite System (GNSS) Service (IGS) stations in China with over 70 stations selected from the Crustal Movement Observation Network of China (CMONOC) to compute CMC series of IGS stations by using a principal component analysis (PCA) method under cases of one whole region and eight sub-regions. The comparison results show that the percentage of first-order principal component (PC1) in North, East and Up components increase by 10.8%, 16.1% and 25.1%, respectively, after dividing the whole China region into eight sub-regions. Meanwhile, Root Mean Square (RMS) reduction rates of residual series that have removed CMC also improve obviously after partitioning. In addition, we compute displacements of these IGS stations caused by environmental loadings (including atmospheric pressure loading, non-tidal oceanic loading and hydrological loading) to analyze their contributions to the non-linear variation in GPS coordinate time series. The comparison result shows that the method we raise, PCA filtering in sub-regions, performs better than the environmental loading corrections (ELCs) in improving the signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) of GPS coordinate time series. This paper raises new criteria for selecting appropriate CMONOC stations around IGS stations when computing sub-regional CMC, involving three criteria of interstation distance, geology and self-condition of stations themselves. According to experiments, these criteria are implemental and effective in selecting suitable stations, by which to extract sub-regional CMC with higher accuracy.