Tae-Suk Bae

Analysis of Crustal Deformation on the Korea Peninsula after the 2011 Tohoku Earthquake

The U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) announced that an earthquake of 9.0 magnitude had occurred near the east coast of Japan on March 11, 2011, resulting in a displacement of the crust of about 2.4 meters. The Korean peninsula is located on the Eurasian tectonic plate that stretches out to Japan; therefore, there is a high possibility of being affected by an earthquake. The Korean GPS CORS network operated by the National Geographic Information Institute (NGII) was processed for ten days before and after the earthquake. Both static and kinematic baseline processing were tested for the determination of crustal deformation. The static baseline processing was performed in two scenarios: 1) fixing three IGS stations in China, Mongolia and Russia; 2) fixing SUWN, one of the CORS networks in Korea, in order to effectively verify crustal deformation. All data processing was carried out using Bernese V5.0. The test results show that most of the parts of the Korean peninsula have moved to the east, ranging 1.2 to 5.6 cm, compared to the final solution of the day before the earthquake. The stations, such as DOKD and ULLE that are established on the islands closer to the epicenter, have clearly moved the largest amounts. Furthermore, the station CHJU, located on the southwestern part of Korea, presents relatively small changes. The relative positioning between CORS confirms the fact that there were internal distortions of the Korean peninsula to some extent. In addition, the 30-second interval kinematic processing of CORS data gives an indication of earthquake signals with some delays depending on the distance from the epicenter.

Geodetic datum transformation to the global geocentric datum for seas and islands around Korea

According to revisions of survey law taking effect on January 1, 2003, the Korean geodetic datum has been changed from a local geodetic to a world geodetic system. Since the datum change demands a geographical data transformation, the National Geographic Information Institute has established step-by-step plans for the transformation of the land data constructed through the National GIS Project, and it is in progress. For maritime data, however, no detailed transformation plan has been established yet. Therefore, it is necessary to analyze the maritime geographic data obtained through the Maritime GIS project and set up the data transformation scheme to a world geodetic system. In this study, the datum transformation parameters especially for the maritime geographical data are determined. From database constructed through MGIS, a total of 492 coordinate pairs were used in parameter determination initially. At this stage, three popular seven parameter transformation models, Bursa-Wolf, Molodensky and Veis model, and the multi regression equation are applied, and the transformation parameters from the Molodensky model are selected for its accuracy and consistency with the land data transformation method. To eliminate the local bias caused by the nonequally distributed stations, a network optimization is applied and 42 stations are selected to determine the final transformation parameters. The distortion after applying the similarity transformation is modeled through a least squares collocation with Gaussian model, and high accuracy better than 15 cm in coordinate transformation is obtained.

Robust Analysis of Network-Based Real-Time Kinematic for GNSS-Derived Heights.

New guidelines and procedures for real-time (RT) network-based solutions are required in order to support Global Navigation Satellite System (GNSS) derived heights. Two kinds of experiments were carried out to analyze the performance of the network-based real-time kinematic (RTK) solutions. New test marks were installed in different surrounding environments, and the existing GPS benchmarks were used for analyzing the effect of different factors, such as baseline lengths, antenna types, on the final accuracy and reliability of the height estimation. The RT solutions are categorized into three groups: single-base RTK, multiple-epoch network RTK (mRTN), and single-epoch network RTK (sRTN). The RTK solution can be biased up to 9 mm depending on the surrounding environment, but there was no notable bias for a longer reference base station (about 30 km) In addition, the occupation time for the network RTK was investigated in various cases. There is no explicit bias in the solution for different durations, but smoother results were obtained for longer durations. Further investigation is needed into the effect of changing the occupation time between solutions and into the possibility of using single-epoch solutions in precise determination of heights by GNSS.

Stability Assessment of FKP System by NGII using Long-term Analysis of NTRIP Correction Signal

Despite the advantage of unlimited access, there are insufficient studies for the accuracy and stability of FKP that blocks the spread of the system for various applications. Therefore, we performed a long-term analysis from continuous real-time positioning, and investigated the error characteristics dependent on the size and the surrounding environment. The FKP shows significant changes in the positioning accuracy at different times of day, where the accuracy during daytime is worse than that of nighttime. In addition, the size and deviation of FKP correction may change with the ionospheric conditions, and high correlation between ambiguity resolution rate and the deviation of correction was observed. The receivers continuously request the correction information in order to cope with sudden variability of ionosphere. On the other hand, the correction information was not received up to an hour in case of stable ionospheric condition. It is noteworthy that the outliers of FKP are clustered in their position with some biases. Since several meters of errors can be occurred for kinematic positioning with FKP, therefore, it is necessary to make appropriate preparation for real-time applications.

A triple difference approach to Low Earth Orbiter precision orbit determination

A precise kinematic orbit determination (P-KOD) procedure for Low Earth Orbiter(LEO) using the GPS ion-free triple differenced carrier phases is presented. Because the triple differenced observables provide only relative information, the first epoch’s positions of the orbit should be held fixed. Then, both forward and backward filtering was executed to mitigate the effect of biases of the first epoch’s position. P-KOD utilizes the precise GPS orbits and ground stations data from International GPS Service (IGS) so that the only unknown parameters to be solved are positions of the satellite at each epoch. Currently, the 3-D accuracy of P-KOD applied to CHAMP (CHAllenging Minisatellite Payload) shows better than 35 cm compared to the published rapid scientific orbit (RSO) solution from GFZ (GeoForschungsZentrum Potsdam). The data screening for cycle slips is a particularly challenging procedure for LEO, which moves very fast in the middle of the ionospheric layer. It was found that data screening using SNR (signal to noise ratio) generates best results based on the residual analysis using RSO. It is expected that much better accuracy are achievable with refined prescreening procedure and optimized geometry of the satellites and ground stations.

Efficient LEO Dynamic Orbit Determination with Triple Differenced GPS Carrier Phases

The dynamic precise orbit determination of a Low Earth Orbit satellite using triple differenced GPS phases is presented in this study. The atmospheric drag parameters are estimated to compensate the incomplete atmosphere model for better precision of the orbit solution. In addition, the empirical force parameters, especially once- and twice-per-revolution components, along with the new IERS Conventions and models to compute the perturbing forces are introduced to absorb the remaining unmodelled forces. The optimal arc length for the parameterization and the data processing strategy are also tested and analyzed for the best orbit solutions. The triple differencing technique enables fast and efficient orbit estimation, because no ambiguity resolution and cycle slip detection are required. With the triple differenced ion-free GPS phase observables, the orbit and the velocity solutions for 24 hours of CHAMP are calculated; they compare with the published Rapid Science Orbit with the accuracy of 8 cm and 0-12 mm/s in 3D RMS for the orbit and the velocity, respectively, and are statistically consistent with the RSO when it is not better than 4 cm in terms of an absolute accuracy. The approach presented here provides an efficient and simple, but robust, alternative approach, while the solutions accuracy is still comparable to the double-difference results.

Estimation of Spatial Coherency Functions for Kriging of Spatial Data

In order to apply Kriging methods for geostatistics of spatial data, an estimation of spatial coherency functions is required priorly based on the spatial distance between measurement points. In the study, the typical coherency functions, such as semi-variogram, homeogram, and covariance function, were estimated using the national geoid model. The test area consisting of 2°×2° and the Unified Control Points (UCPs) within the area were chosen as sampling measurements of the geoid. Based on the distance between the control points, a total of 100 sampling points were grouped into distinct pairs and assigned into a bin. Empirical values, which were calculated with each of the spatial coherency functions, resulted out as a wave model of a semi-variogram for the best quality of fit. Both of homeogram and covariance functions were better fitted into the exponential model. In the future, the methods of various Kriging and the functions of estimated spatial coherency need to be studied to verify the prediction accuracy and to calculate the Mean Squared Prediction Error (MSPE).