Data Quality Monitoring and Noise Analysis at the EUREF Permanent Network

The EUREF Permanent Network (EPN) includes now more then 150 GNSS stations of different quality and different observation history. The greatest portion of the sites is settled on the tectonically stable parts of Eurasia, where only mm-level yearly displacements are expected. In order to extract the relevant geophysical information, sophisticated analysis tools and stable, long term observations are necessary. As the EPN is operational since 1996, it offers the potential to estimate high quality velocities associated with reliable uncertainties. In order to support this work, a set of efficient and demonstrative tools have been developed to monitor the data and station quality. The periodically upgraded results are displayed on the website of the EPN Central Bureau (CB) (www.epncb.oma.be) in terms of sky plots, graphs of observation percentage, cycle slips and multipath. The different quality plots are indirectly used for the interpretation of the time series. Sudden changes or unusual variation in the time series (beyond the obvious equipment change) often correlates with changes in the environment mirrored by the quality plots. These graphs are vital for the proper interpretation and the understanding of the real processes. Knowing the nuisance factors, we can generate cleaner time series. We are presenting relevant examples of this work. Two kinds of time series plots are displayed at the EPN CB website: raw and improved time series. They are cumulative solutions of the weekly EPN SINEX files using the minimum constraint approach. Within the improved time series the outliers and offsets are already taken into account. We will also present preliminary results of a detailed noise analysis of the EPN time series. The target of this work is twofold: on one side we aim at computing more realistic velocity estimates of the EPN stations and on the other side the information about the station noise characteristics will support the removal and proper interpretation of site-specific phenomena .