Volume 12, Issue 3

Climate change has been adversely affecting glaciers causing them to advance and recession worldwide. Existing studies have primarily attributed temperature as the leading factor causing glacier recession. However, detailed studies that investigate effect of other factors like presence of debris cover, slope, and contact with water bodies are still scarce. This research, thus investigated the role of supraglacial lakes in recession of debris-covered glaciers (DCG). Such glaciers were studied since these lakes are found in debris-covered glaciers only. For this purpose the interannual variation in area of supraglacial lakes of Dudh Koshi basin was computed to test the hypothesis that these lakes play a significant role in glacier recession. Supraglacial lakes were delineated using Google Earth Pro at five year intervals to assess interannual variation in lake area. Slope, elevation and change in supraglacial lake area were the predictors influencing average decadal change in area of glaciers. Two models prepared using multiple linear regression in Excel were compared. The first model used elevation and slope as predictors while the second model used change in supraglacial lake area as the additional predictor. The second model had a higher coefficient of determination (R square) and Adjusted R-square values of 99 % and 96 % compared to the first model. Further test statistics from Analysis of Variance (ANOVA) results were compared to test the hypothesis. Moreover the Root mean square error (RMSE) of second model was also less than the first one. Hence both the regression statistics and RMSE confirmed that change in area of supraglacial lakes was an important factor that influences overall recession of debris-covered glaciers. Nevertheless, use of high spatial and temporal resolution imageries along-with increase in number of glaciers sampled should be incorporated in future studies to ensure robust outcomes. Thus this research can bolster the overall understanding between glacier and glacial lake dynamics which will improve the resilience of downstream inhabitants from climate induced hazards, such as glacial lake outburst floods (GLOFs).

The “Transformations in Four Dimensions” (TRANS4D) software was developed to enable geospatial professionals and others to transform 3-D positional coordinates referred to one date to corresponding positional coordinates referred to another date. For this purpose, TRANS4D incorporates 3-D crustal velocity models for most of the United States and Canada. In this report, an improved model for the vertical velocity field of that part of the conterminous United States that resides west of longitude 107°W is introduced. A new estimation process was employed so that this newer velocity field would have a spatial resolution of 0.0625° × 0.0625° in latitude and longitude, whereas the spatial resolution of TRANS4D’s previous model for this area was 0.25° × 0.25°. The realized improvements benefited from the inclusion of repeated geodetic data at approximately 1300 new locations and from the longer time spans of repeated geodetic data at other locations. After removing that part of the current vertical velocity field due to the glacial isostatic adjustment associated with the Last Glacial Maximum, features of the remaining vertical velocity field are discussed in terms of ongoing geophysical processes. These processes include subduction in the Pacific Northwest, uplift along the San Andreas Fault System, and subsidence due to groundwater extraction in California’s Central Valley. They also include uplift within both the Yellowstone Caldera and the Long Valley Caldera, uplift near Hebgen Lake in Montana, and subsidence near Lassen Peak Volcano in California.

The Basque Country in the north of Spain is located inside the Basque-Cantabrian basin of the western Pyrenees which remarkable seismic-tectonic implications justify the need of geodetic control in the area. In order to perform a crustal deformation study we have analysed all daily observations from the GNSS permanent network of Guipuzcoa and external IGS stations, from January 2007 to November 2011. We have carried out the data processing applying double differences methodology in the automatic processing module BPE (Bernese Processing Engine) from Bernese GNSS software version 5.0. Solution was aligned to geodetic reference framework ITRF2008, by using the IGS08 solution and updated satellite and terrestrial antennas calibration. This five years network study results: Coordinate time series, velocities and baseline lengths variations show internal stability among inner stations and from them with respect to outer IGS stations, concluding that no deformations have been observed.

The availability of multiple signals from different Global Navigation Satellite System (GNSS) constellations provides opportunities for improving positioning accuracy and initial convergence time. With dual-frequency observations from the four constellations (GPS, GLONASS, Galileo, and BeiDou), it is possible to investigate combined GNSS precise point positioning (PPP) accuracy and stability. The differences between GNSS systems result in inter-system biases (ISBs). We consider several ISB values such as GPS-GLONASS, GPS-Galileo, and GPS-BeiDou. These biases are compliant with key parameters defined in the multi-GNSS PPP processing. In this study, we present a unified PPP method that sets ISB values as fixed or constant. A comprehensive analysis that includes satellite visibility, position dilution of precision, position accuracy is performed to evaluate a unified PPP method with constrained cut-off elevation angles. Compared to the conventional PPP solutions, our approach shows more stable positioning at a constrained cut-off elevation angle of 50 degrees.

With the successful use of GPS-only-based POD (precise orbit determination), more and more satellites carry onboard GPS receivers to support their orbit accuracy requirements. It provides continuous GPS observations in high precision, and becomes an indispensable way to obtain the orbit of LEO satellites. Precise orbit determination of LEO satellites plays an important role for the application of LEO satellites. Numerous factors should be considered in the POD processing. In this paper, several factors that impact precise orbit determination are analyzed, namely the satellite altitude, the time-variable earth’s gravity field, the GPS satellite clock error and accelerometer observation. The GRACE satellites provide ideal platform to study the performance of factors for precise orbit determination using zero-difference GPS data. These factors are quantitatively analyzed on affecting the accuracy of dynamic orbit using GRACE observations from 2005 to 2011 by SHORDE software. The study indicates that: (1) with the altitude of the GRACE satellite is lowered from 480 km to 460 km in seven years, the 3D (three-dimension) position accuracy of GRACE satellite orbit is about 3∼4 cm based on long spans data; (2) the accelerometer data improves the 3D position accuracy of GRACE in about 1 cm; (3) the accuracy of zero-difference dynamic orbit is about 6 cm with the GPS satellite clock error products in 5 min sampling interval and can be raised to 4 cm, if the GPS satellite clock error products with 30 s sampling interval can be adopted. (4) the time-variable part of earth gravity field model improves the 3D position accuracy of GRACE in about 0.5∼1.5 cm. Based on this study, we quantitatively analyze the factors that affect precise orbit determination of LEO satellites. This study plays an important role to improve the accuracy of LEO satellites orbit determination.

A three-dimensional distance network is composed of a system of points or nodes located on earth’s surface or in space, in a building or in a construction site. Localization of these nodes is a fundamental operation in geodetic and sensor networks. This paper shows a new method for calculating n-dimensional dynamic distance networks, whereas a spectral decomposition of a symmetric matrix of squared distances is used. Thereby neither approximation, nor iterative solutions are used. By using this method, fixed reference points can be selected as well as noisy distances can be denoised and checked for consistency. Given a realistic scenario, Monte-Carlo simulations show that the proposed method always converge to an optimal solution with less computation time than numerically optimized Levenberg-Marquandt method.