Seasonal hydrological loading in southern Alaska observed by GPS and GRACE

We compare vertical seasonal loading deformation observed by continuous GPS stations in southern Alaska and modeled vertical displacements due to seasonal hydrological loading inferred from GRACE. Seasonal displacements are significant, and GPS-observed and GRACE-modeled seasonal displacements are highly correlated. We define a measure called the WRMS Reduction Ratio to measure the fraction of the position variations at seasonal periods removed by correcting the GPS time series using a seasonal model based on GRACE. The median WRMS Reduction Ratio is 0.82 and the mean is 0.73 +/- 0.26, with a value of 1.0 indicating perfect agreement of GPS and GRACE. The effects of atmosphere and non-tidal ocean loading are important; we add the AOD1B de-aliasing model to the GRACE solutions because the displacements due to these loads are present in the GPS data, and this improves the correlations between these two geodetic measurements. We find weak correlations for some stations located in areas where the magnitude of the load changes over a short distance, due to GRACE's limited spatial resolution. GRACE models can correct seasonal displacements for campaign GPS measurements as well. Citation: Fu, Y., J. T. Freymueller, and T. Jensen (2012), Seasonal hydrological loading in southern Alaska observed by GPS and GRACE, Geophys. Res. Lett., 39, L15310, doi:10.1029/2012GL052453.