A Real-Time GNSS Network of the Americas
Abstract
The Network of the Americas (NOTA) includes over 1000 GNSS sites drawn from the Plate Boundary Observatory in the western US, COCONet in the Caribbean region and TLALOCNet across Mexico. While UNAVCO maintains NOTA, it is a multi-nation supported network. PBO is funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF) and TLALOCNet jointly by NSF and the National Council of Science and Technology, Mexico. Over 35 institutions from South, Central, and North America participate in COCONet. As of July 2018, 850 stations of the NOTA network have been converted to 1-sps, real-time data flow.
Data usage of the real-time streams is multidisciplinary and international. While the the Plate Boundary Observatory was initially built to enable research on the tectonics of the North American - Pacific plate boundary, the transition to real-time high rate data distribution has opened the network to a much broader group of data users. The streams are now being used for real-time hazards monitoring, weather applications, upper atmosphere studies, surveying, transportation infrastructure management, and in research on autonomous vehicles. At any given time there are thousands of connections to UNAVCO's real-time casters. Data availability, low latency and good quality are critical for real-time data analysis. As streaming becomes the default GNSS network operations mode, it is increasingly important to have a standardized set of metrics by which to compare station real-time performance. While the greatest amount of data usage is currently with the raw observation streams, there is growing interest in the real-time Precise Point Positions (PPP) generated by UNAVCO particularly for public safety systems e.g., earthquake and tsunami early warning operations. UNAVCO is processing all NOTA real-time sites with Trimble RTX, a subset is being processed simultaneously with BKG-BNC with plans to add other software to our testing system. Our goal is to examine the variation in solutions between the packages and with on-site receiver-based processing. In this presentation, we will summarize the diverse usage of the real-time GNSS streams, describe UNAVCO's development of network metrics and show the initial results of the PPP software comparisons.- Publication:
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AGU Fall Meeting Abstracts
- Pub Date:
- December 2018
- Bibcode:
- 2018AGUFMIN42B..04H
- Keywords:
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- 3360 Remote sensing;
- ATMOSPHERIC PROCESSESDE: 1863 Snow and ice;
- HYDROLOGYDE: 4315 Monitoring;
- forecasting;
- prediction;
- NATURAL HAZARDSDE: 7924 Forecasting;
- SPACE WEATHER