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Abstract

In recent times increasing numbers of high-rate GNSS stations have been installed around the world and set-up to provide data in real-time. These networks provide a great opportunity to quickly capture surface displacements, which makes them important as potential constituents of earthquake/tsunami monitoring and warning systems. The appropriate GPS real-time data analysis with sufficient accuracy for this purpose is a main focus of the current GNSS research. The objective of this thesis is to develop high-precision GNSS algorithms for better seismological applications. The core research and the contributions of this thesis are summarized as following: With the availability of real-time high-rate GNSS observations and precise satellite orbit and clock products, the interest in the real-time Precise Point Positioning (PPP) technique has greatly increased to construct displacement waveforms and to invert for source parameters of earthquakes in real time. Furthermore, PPP ambiguity resolution approaches, developed in the recent years, overcome the accuracy limitation of the standard PPP float solution and achieve comparable accuracy with relative positioning. In this thesis, we introduce the real-time PPP service system and the key techniques for real-time PPP ambiguity resolution. We assess the performance of the ambiguity-fixed PPP in real-time scenarios and confirm that positioning accuracy in terms of root mean square (RMS) of 1.0~1.5 cm can be achieved in horizontal components. For the 2011 Tohoku-Oki (Japan) and the 2010 El Mayor-Cucapah (Mexico) earthquakes, the displacement waveforms, estimated from ambiguity-fixed PPP and those provided by the accelerometer instrumentation are consistent in the dynamic component within few centimeters. The PPP fixed solution not only can improve the accuracy of coseismic displacements, but also provides a reliable recovery of earthquake magnitude and of the fault slip distribution in real time. We propose an augmented point positioning method for GPS based hazard monitoring, which can achieve fast or even instantaneous precise positioning without relying on data of a specific reference station. The proposed method overcomes the limitations of the currently mostly used GPS processing approaches of relative positioning and global precise point positioning. The advantages of the proposed approach are demonstrated by using GPS data, which was recorded during the 2011 Tohoku-Oki earthquake in Japan. We propose a new approach to quickly capture coseismic displacements with a single GNSS receiver in real-time. The new approach can overcome the convergence problem of precise point positioning (PPP), and also avoids the integration process of the variometric approach. Using the results of the 2011 Tohoku-Oki earthquake, it is demonstrated that the proposed method can provide accurate displacement waveforms and permanent coseismic offsets at an accuracy of few centimeters, and can also reliably recover the moment magnitude and fault slip distribution. We investigate three current existing single-receiver approaches for real-time GNSS seismology, comparing their observation models for equivalence and assessing the impact of main error components. We propose some refinements to the variometric approach and especially consider compensating the geometry error component by using the accurate initial coordinates before the earthquake to eliminate the drift trend in the integrated coseismic displacements. We propose an approach for tightly integrating GPS and strong motion data on raw observation level to increase the quality of the derived displacements. The performance of the proposed approach is demonstrated using 5 Hz high-rate GPS and 200 Hz strong motion data collected during the El Mayor-Cucapah earthquake (Mw 7.2, 4 April, 2010) in Baja California, Mexico. The new approach not only takes advantages of both GPS and strong motion sensors, but also improves the reliability of the displacement by enhancing GPS integer-cycle phase ambiguity resolution, which is very critical for deriving displacements with highest quality. We also explore the use of collocated GPS and seismic sensors for earthquake monitoring and early warning. The GPS and seismic data collected during the 2011 Tohoku-Oki (Japan) and the 2010 El Mayor-Cucapah (Mexico) earthquakes are analyzed by using a tightly-coupled integration. The performance of the integrated results are validated by both time and frequency domain analysis. We detect the P-wave arrival and observe small-scale features of the movement from the integrated results and locate the epicenter. Meanwhile, permanent offsets are extracted from the integrated displacements highly accurately and used for reliable fault slip inversion and magnitude estimation.