The impact of observation losses on IVS-R1/R4 VLBI sessions

Abstract

Global VLBI observations, to measure Earth orientation and station positions, are organised into 24-hour sessions. Each session has a bespoke schedule created, optimised for the particular time period and the station network that is available during it. Due to various factors, whether it be station outages, sensitivity issues or source effects, not all scheduled observations are available, or of sufficient quality, to be included in the final geodetic analysis. In this paper we derive statistics about the number of missing observations, as well as their effect on the expected precision of geodetic parameters such as station positions and Earth Orientation Parameters. We investigate the impact of observation loss on the weekly rapid turnaround IVS-R1 and IVS-R4 geodetic VLBI sessions over a decade period from 2014 - 2023. Across our 1030 sessions we find on average 25.3\% of observations scheduled do not make it to analysis. This results in median performance losses, when compared to the scheduled versions, of 18.8%, 19.2%, 12.1/11.3% and 28.7/22.9% for UT1-UTC, 3D station position, X/Y nutation and x/y polar motion respectively. We find that the estimation of X/Y nutation is particularly robust to typical observation loss seen from these 24-hour sessions. Conversely, we see high-rates of critical degradation in performance (a doubling of the scheduled repeatability) for other geodetic parameters at observations losses of between 15 - 19%, which is less than the median loss of 25.3% that we find across this 10-year period.