Convergence of daily mean coordinates of precise positioning methods
Abstract As part of the research of modern movements of the Earth’s crust, an analysis of 7 high-precision methods for calculating GNSS positions was carried out for the convergence of their daily mean coordinates. Based on Euclidean distances, regular and maximal discrepancies between coordinates of different methods are given. According to the coordinates in the ITRF, 5 methods are stood out with regular coordinate discrepancies <1 mm, and individual maximum discrepancies up to 30 mm. The other two methods have regular discrepancies in coordinates up to 2 cm, and the maximum differences reach 1 m. For a group of stations global coordinates transformation into a local reference frame leads to the effect of coordinate stabilization and increases their relative precision in the time series. As a result of such procedure, the level of maximum coordinate discrepancies between the methods decreased to 46%. Moreover, one of the methods of calculating coordinates has improved its convergence with the other methods by 80%. Based on the Euclidean distance method, the quality of the raw data for each station was evaluated. Thus, there is a group of 8 stations, for which the convergence of coordinates in different methods are approximately at the same level, and 2-3 times better than for the other 2 stations.