Application of PPP with ambiguity resolution in earth surface deformation studies: a case study in eastern Canada

摘要

Earth surface deformations are commonly studied by processing observations of continuously operating GPS (CGPS) stations located in the deformation area using differential methods. In this study, we assessed the performance of precise point positioning (PPP) with and without ambiguity resolution (AR) to recover station velocities. Using 37 CGPS stations mostly located in eastern Canada over a 10-year period, the PPP-derived velocities were compared with the official velocities of Natural Resources Canada obtained from differential processing using the Bernese GNSS Software. The estimated horizontal and vertical velocities of the three solutions (PPP, PPP-AR and differential) were in good agreement, and show the overall rotation and vertical uplift/subsidence of the study region. The same consistency was observed by comparing intraplate horizontal velocities. Ambiguity fixing abilities in PPP showed substantial improvement in the east component compared to the float solution. PPP was also found to considerably reduce computational load by processing each station independently, taking approximately 2.2 seconds per station on a desktop computer. The results of this study confirmed that PPP-AR can provide position and velocity accuracy comparable to a global differential solution, and can be used for identifying intraplate velocities.