Point wise Determination of Vertical Deformation at southern Coastal Areas of Caspian Sea by Combination of Satellite Altimetry and Tide Gauge Observations

Abstract

In this paper, a combination of satellite altimetry (SA) and tide-gauge (TG) observations is used to determine the pattern of vertical deformation at southern coasts of Caspian Sea. Satellite altimetry measures the variations of sea water surface with a respect to a reference ellipsoid, while tide gauge data gives the sea level relative to a particular ground station; consequently, the difference between these two observations will give the vertical motion at the ground station. However, altimeter satellites still have problems at shallow waters or coastal areas which leads to inaccurate and corrupted sea surface height at tide gauge stations. To minimize this imprecision, two strategies are applied for the selection of the suitable SA points near the TG stations. The First one is to choose those close passes to the TG stations, provided that the SA data is not corrupted (range observation is available). The second strategy is to extrapolate the SA points at TG stations using Spatio- Temporal Kriging method. In both point of views, use is made of re-tracking methods to improve the ranges of SA observations near the coast. Amplitudes of tidal components are removed from both SA and TG observations to derive the residual tide free signals. Afterward, a linear trend is fitted to the residual signals in the sense of least square; the difference between these two, supplies the vertical deformation of the ground station. The results illustrate that the average vertical crustal motion at Anzali, Noshahr and Neka are -1.387, -1.903 and -3.14 mm/year, respectively.