Geoscience Reference
In-Depth Information
Atmospheric Pressure Loading
Dudy D. Wijaya, Johannes Böhm, Maria Karbon, Hana Kràsnà and
Harald Schuh
Abstract
Loading of the Earth's crust due to variations of global atmosphere pres-
sure can displace the positions of geodetic sites by more than 1 cm both vertically
and horizontally on annual to sub-diurnal time scales, and thus has to be taken into
account in the analysis of space geodetic observations. This part of the topic dis-
cusses methods for the calculation of the displacements. In particular, it summarizes
the simple approach with regression coefficients between surface pressure and the
vertical displacement and the more rigorous geophysical approach with load Love
numbers and Green's functions. Furthermore, we describe the special treatment of
the thermal tides (S1 and S2), the importance of the reference pressure, as well as
the inverted barometer hypothesis for the oceans. Finally, we present space geodetic
results with the application of those correction models for the analysis of Very Long
Baseline Interferometry observations.
