Determination of Plate Tectonics Using Least Squares Spectral Analysis of Daily GPS Time Series: Case Study of Southern California Integrated GPS Network

Abstract

The Global Positioning System represents one of the measurement systems in understanding the movement of the Earth's surface. The accurate determination of station velocities – rates and directions as geophysical parameters of plate tectonics, requires that positional offsets and systematic effects in coordinate time series are correctly found and compensated. In our study we use a least-squares spectral analysis to compute and extract significant periodicities in GPS coordinate time series. The method was implemented on 125 continuously operating GPS stations of the Southern California Integrated GPS Network.