A VLBI baseline post-adjustment approach for station velocity estimation in Eurasian continent

Abstract

Baseline lengths and their time-derivatives among 58 geodetic VLBI stations were fitted by using 4439 observing sessions from the International VLBI Service for Geodesy and Astrometry (IVS). First, the velocities of eight stations in Eurasian continent were set as unknown quantities. Then, two standard global solutions from 3523 IVS sessions and 1110 sessions from database code XA, respectively, were applied prior to all-station coordinates and the non-estimated station velocities. Finally, from the relations among the coordinates, velocities, baseline length and its time-derivative, two types of baseline post-adjustment (BPA) were used to estimate the velocities of the eight stations. We discuss the data processing details, including the effect of different prior values for the stations and the optimal solution.The results suggest that the precision of the station velocities based on the proposed approach is comparable to that of the global solution of the XA sessions. The baseline structure and the prior values of the stations affect the velocity estimates. Compared to the standard method of velocity estimation, there are no external constrains and conditions used in the proposed method.