Determination of earth rotation parameters and adjustment of a global geodetic positioning system

Description

This thesis focuses on the determination of the Earth rotation parameters (ERO) and the adjustment of a global geodetic network using the Global Positioning System (GPS) technique. Basedon the GPS Differential POsitioning Program (DIPOP) software package of the Department of Geodesy and Geomatics Engineering at the University of New Brunswick, the advanced software name DIPOP.ERP has been implemented. DIPOP.ERP accompanied by preprocessors PREDD.ERP and PREGE.ERP has been extensively used to process data collected during the GPS'92 campaign organized by the International GPS Geodymanics Service (IGS). Data from a seven-day period (from 25 to 31 July, 1992) collected from this campaign have been processed. Four strategies were designed for the software testing and parametric estimation on daily and seven day bases. In the first three of them, the number of the different fixed stations was chosen. In the last strategy, the precise orbits were used in addition to the coordinates of the 28 IGS core stations equipped with dual frequency Rogue receivers, the initial orbital parameters of 18 GPS satellites, the tropospheric scale factor for each station and ambiguities, daily Earth rotation parameters were estimated, based on the double difference algorithm for the carrier beat phase measurement. The results of this experiment demonstrate that the Earth rotation parameters can be recovered with an accuracy of about a few tenths of a milli-arcsecond. A comparison of the estimated polar motion values with the IERS values at the few milli-arcsecond level. The daily repeatabilities for the coordinates of most stations ranged from a few centimeters to about ten centimeters.