Atmospheric pressure loading for routine data analysis

Abstract

We have computed 3-D displacements induced by atmospheric pressure loading from 6-hourly surface pressure field from NCEP (National Center for Environmental Predictions) Reanalysis data for all Very Long Baseline Interferometry) and SLR (Satellite Laser Ranging) stations. We have quantitatively estimated the error budget our time series of pressure loading and found that the errors are below 15%. We validated our loading series by comparing them with a dataset of 3.5 million VLBI observations for the period of 1980--2003. We have shown that the amount of power which is present in the loading time series, but does not present in the VLBI data is, on average, only 5%. We have also succeeded, for the first time, to detect horizontal displacements caused by atmospheric loading. The correction of atmospheric loading in VLBI data allows a significant reduction of baseline repeatability, except for the annual component.