A Novel Method to Improve the Estimation of Ocean Tide Loading Displacements for K1 and K2 Components with GPS Observations

Abstract

The accurate estimation of ocean tide loading displacements is essential and necessary for geodesy, oceanic and geophysical studies. It is common knowledge that K1 and K2 tidal constituents estimated from Global Positioning System (GPS) observations are unsatisfactory because their tidal periods are nearly same to the revisit cycle or orbital period of GPS constellation. To date, this troublesome problem is not fully solved. In this paper, we revisit this important issue and develop a novel method based on the unique characteristic of tidal waves to separate GPS-system errors from astronomical K1/K2 tides. The well-known credo of smoothness indicates that tidal admittances of astronomical constituents in a narrow band can be expressed as smooth functions of tidal frequencies, while the interference of GPS-system errors seriously damages the smooth nature of observed tidal admittances. Via quadratic fitting, smooth functions of tidal frequencies for tidal admittances can be determined, thus, astronomical K1 and K2 tides can be interpolated using fitted quadratic functions. Three GPS stations are selected to demonstrate our method because of their typicality in terms of poor estimates of K1/K2 tidal parameters related to GPS-system errors. After removing GPS-systematical contributions based on our method, corrected K1/K2 tides at three GPS stations are much closer to the modeled K1/K2 tides from FES2014, which is one of the most accurate tide models. Furthermore, the proposed method can be easily applied to other areas to correct GPS-system errors because their smooth nature is valid for global tidal signals.