GPS Data Acquisition and Processing for Glaciological Applications: A Community View of the Unique Applications, Challenges, and Solutions
Abstract
The NSF funded glaciology community and UNAVCO have worked together for over 15 years on a variety of glacier and ice sheet applications primarily in Antarctica, Alaska, and Greenland. We provide highlights of robust solutions gained from this experience, including hardware and set-up considerations, advances in remote data retrieval with satellite based communications, power solutions related to collecting continuous data through the polar dark months, and emerging infrastructure from International Polar Year projects. We also discuss data processing related to fundamental differences between the data processing needs of glaciologists and the solid earth science community: station velocities are much larger and/or modulated by tidal effects often requiring sub-daily solutions, precision requirements are often less stringent, global reference frame issues are less of a concern while local reference frames are complicated by the ice dynamics, and baseline lengths tend to be much shorter (the case of a glacier where its easy to set up a local base on rock) or much longer (the case of an ice sheet with no practical base station locations for 100s of kms). Several data processing solutions are readily available, but there are also substantial data processing challenges facing the community, particularly to produce the time series desired from continuous data collection.
- Publication:
-
AGU Fall Meeting Abstracts
- Pub Date:
- December 2007
- Bibcode:
- 2007AGUFM.G33B1236J
- Keywords:
-
- 0700 CRYOSPHERE (4540);
- 0720 Glaciers;
- 0726 Ice sheets;
- 0776 Glaciology (1621;
- 1827;
- 1863);
- 1294 Instruments and techniques