IGCP 565 Workshop 3: Separating Hydrological and Tectonic Signals in Geodetic Observations Reno, Nevada, October 11-13, 2010

B3: Separating plate tectonics, postglacial rebound and contemporary global change signals

Co-Chairs: Bert Vermeersen (Technical University Delft), Holger Steffen (University Calgary)

Geodetic observations such as GPS measurements or the GRACE satellite mission contain signals of different sources. For example, GRACE observes variations in the gravity field that result from the integral effect of mass variations in the atmosphere, hydrosphere and geosphere. On regional to global scales, processes associated with plate tectonics, postglacial rebound, and, recently, increased contemporary mass changes due to melting of glaciers and ice sheets and large-scale changes in land water storage are producing overlapping and correlated geodetic fingerprints that are hard to separate. Thus, a key issue is the separation of the various signal parts and, to get the signal of interest, the reduction of unwanted observed quantities by applying dedicated models. This Breakout Session is expected to focus on the separation of signals from large-scale surface loading and tectonic process in geodetic observations such as GPS, VLBI, tide gauges, satellite altimetry and terrestrial and satellite gravity measurements. We invite papers that review the current status in modeling and extracting these signals from different geodetic observations and that discuss the main obstacles for separating the fingerprint.