Automated processing of daily GNSS coordinate time series: data correction, velocity estimation and grouping of station motion

Earth Surface Processes, Geodynamics, and Subsurface Exploration

Authors

First and Last Name Academic degree E-mail Affiliation
Andrii Paikush No andrii.paikush.asp.2025 [at] lpnu.ua Lviv Polytechnic National University
Lviv, Ukraine
Ihor Savchyn Sc.D. Ihor.R.Savchyn [at] lpnu.ua Lviv Polytechnic National University
Lviv, Ukraine

I and my co-authors (if any) authorize the use of the Paper in accordance with the Creative Commons CC BY license

First published on this website: 26.08.2026 - 23:36
Abstract 

The number of permanent GNSS stations, and the volume of daily solutions they produce, has grown to a point where station-by-station manual analysis is no longer practicable. This work presents an automated pipeline that takes daily coordinate series from the Nevada Geodetic Laboratory through five stages: acquisition and sorting by tectonic plate, noise filtering, data correction, velocity estimation, and unsupervised grouping of station motion. A linear velocity with annual and semi-annual harmonics is fitted by least squares, and the velocities are cross-checked against an independent plate-motion model used for verification only, which never filters or removes observations. The correction stage proves decisive, because undetected or wrongly imposed offsets propagate directly into velocity. Segmentation with a prescribed number of breakpoints is replaced by a penalised criterion; the surviving offsets are estimated jointly with the trend and seasonal terms and judged against the empirical level noise of each series rather than a white-noise standard error. On synthetic series with realistic white-plus-flicker noise the procedure leaves 0.18 spurious offsets per series instead of 30, detects offsets from 8 mm, and narrows the velocity error range from 7.58 to 1.24 mm/yr. On a 50-station Eurasian test set the median horizontal velocity falls from 8.27 to 3.58 mm/yr, while undisturbed stations stay unchanged.

References 

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