Tidal Analysis of Very Long Gravity Time Series

We report on the tidal analyses carried out on very long gravity time series collected at three European permanent gravity observatories. According to the Nyquist's criterion, very long gravity series enable us to obtain a high resolution spectral analysis in the tidal bands allowing to separate small amplitude waves in the major tidal groups and also to attempt to detect very long period (18.6 and 9 yr) tides that have never been observed in gravity data. For this study we use 2 long data sets recorded by spring gravimeters in BFO (Germany) (1980-2012) and in Walferdange (Luxemburg) (1980-1995) as well as two time series (1987-1996 and 1996-2012) from two superconducting gravimeters located at the Strasbourg station (France). It is well known that the temporal changes of the instrumental sensitivity may introduce a related error in the tidal analysis. Hence the sensitivity of each instrument is investigated using the temporal variations of the delta factor for the main tidal waves (O1, K1, M2, and S2) as well as the M2/O1 delta factor ratio. Our findings demonstrate that the lack of long term stability of the spring instruments prevents from more detailed spectral analysis; on the contrary promising results have been obtained from gravity data collected by the two superconducting gravimeters operating at different consecutive epochs at Strasbourg. We checked the stability of instrumental sensitivity using numerous calibration experiments carried out during the last 15 years by co-located absolute gravity measurements. It turns out that the SG stability is much better than the one that can be achieved by SG/AG calibration repetitions. The observed temporal evolution of the tidal delta factors in Strasbourg is also compared with results from other European SG stations. Finally, we compare the observed parameters, with those theoretically estimated from the solid Earth tide models. The results demonstrate that long series of precise SG observations are a powerful tool to attempt to detect small tidal waves like the ones generated by the third-degree potential and the very low frequency lunisolar tidal potential.