Co-Seismic Deformations Impact on Geodetic Time Series and Reference Frame Determination

One of the major sources of error in reference frame determination comes from the undetected discontinuities in station position time series, particularly in GNSS data. Until now, discontinuities in station position time series due to large earthquakes were usually detected visually. Based on a geophysical modeling, we develop a method to predict the effect of co-seismic deformations on position series. Investigating a global network of GPS stations, we demonstrate that a systematic global modeling of co-seismic deformations helps greatly to detect discontinuities in GPS coordinate time series. We show that numerous discontinuities induced by earthquakes are too small to be visually detected because of seasonal variations and GPS noise that disturb their identification. However, not taking these discontinuities into account has a large impact on the station velocity estimation, considering today’s precision requirements. Beyond time series discontinuities, we also investigate GPS station displacements induced by two decades of accumulated seismicity. We show here that the accumulation of very small co-seismic deformations may explain non-linear behaviors of GPS station position. It raises the unexpected question of the treatment of such station non-linear motions in reference frame elaboration.