1996–2017 GPS position time series, velocities and quality measures for the CORS Network

Abstract

Abstract The CORS network is a volunteer-based network of Global Positioning System reference stations located mainly in the US and its territories. We discuss the most recent comprehensive reprocessing of all GPS data collected via this network since 1996. Daily data for GPS weeks 834 through 1933 were reprocessed leading to epoch 2010.0 coordinates and velocities of 3049 stations aligned to IGS14. The updated realization of the US National Spatial Reference System derived in this work has been in use since late 2019. As a validation of the results, the derived velocity field is compared to several other solutions and to three regional geophysical and geodetic velocity models. These comparisons uncovered unstable stations which move differently than the regional kinematics around them. Once these are ignored, we estimate the horizontal and vertical stability of this updated realization to be better than ∼0.3 and ∼0.6 mm/year, respectively. We use the position residuals and estimated uncertainties from this reprocessing to derive long-term stability measures for all active stations serving longer than 3 years. These measures exposed ∼60 CORS with the poorest long-term stability, which have been consequently excluded from serving as mapping control.