GNSS activities for natural disaster monitoring and climate change detection at GFZ-An overview

Abstract

Natural hazards and climate change are of major concern to the society. Huge losses are reported in recent years. It is widely believed that modern GNSS technologies are effective in hazard monitoring and climate change detection and modelling. Considering the limitations of current accuracy and reliability, sophisticated strategies and models have to be developed. We introduce and overview recent GNSS activities at GFZ in this field, including ground and satellite based atmospheric sounding, reflectometry and GNSS seismology. In addition we summarize recent hardware developments, where new robust on-site hardware systems combining GNSS receiver and other sensors (e.g. seismic sensors and weather sensors) are developed. The main focus of our contribution is recent results of GNSS analysis software developments for real-time applications, where multi-technique (e.g. SLR and GNSS) and multi-system (e.g. GPS and GLONASS) data source can be handled uniquely. The software can run in real-time as well as post-processing modes, and precision of several mm for ground surface deformation can be achieved. We overview the ground and spaced based GNSS atmosphere researches based on the estimation and assimilation of atmosphere parameters, which are among those parameters estimated from our GNSS software. Related projects, applying these new developments, are also introduced. © 2010 Springer Science+Business Media B.V.