Determination of the Ocean Tide Constituents Loading Based on GPS Measurements in the Chinese Offshore Islands

Ocean tide loading largely affects the accuracy of GPS positioning. In turn, GPS measurements could be used to monitor the ocean tide loading effect. In this paper, 67-days GPS observations from two island GPS stations, respectively located in the East China Sea and the South China Sea, were collected and calculated in 30s sampling rate using the Precise Point Positioning (PPP) algorithm. The variation of GPS observed position time series are 2cm in the horizontal and 7cm in the vertical generated by the ocean tide loading effect and other error sources. With the power spectra analysis by the Fast Fourier Transform (FFT), the eigenvalues of the semidiurnal constituents and the diurnal constituents are obtained from the GPS estimates time series. The calculated frequencies are well agreements to the known within the error less than 1.5% for K1,Q1, O1, K2,S2, M2,N2, but P1 within 4.2%. The calculated amplitudes are also well consistent with the results from the global tide models FES2004,NAO.99 and GOT4.7. Their difference in the amplitude are mostly less than 5mm in the horizontal and the vertical direction, except K1 and M2. The maximum amplitude difference occurs in K1 and M2 up to 1.5cm in the vertical direction. In additional, two islands locate at the different transmission Channel, but they give the same calculated frequency in the horizontal and the vertical directional, respectively for 8 tidal constituents. This exhibits they belongs to the same tide wave system as in fact.