Decomposition of deformation primitives of horizontal geodetic networks: application to Taiwan’s GPS network

Abstract.

The contribution to each component of the deformation vector due to a marginally undetected blunder in an observation is split into two parts, and so are the deformation measures at a point. The first part, called the local component (or self component), signifies the contribution due to the redundancy-related multiplier belonging to the observation itself, while the second part, called the complementary component, shows the contribution due to the non-redundancy-related multipliers belonging to the observation. A larger redundancy results in a smaller local component for each component of the deformation vector. However, robustness due to an observation at a point is correlated with redundancy to a significant extent. The first-order global positioning system (GPS)-geodetic network of Taiwan was examined for its robustness. The experiments seem to indicate that: (1) large deformations tend to be found at points where the group redundancies are small; (2) the local components monopolize deformation measures at the perimeter stations of the network where very small redundancy numbers are found; (3) the largest deformation at a point may be due to an observation not directly tied to the point of interest; and (4) except for local twisting, deformation measures and mean positional precisions at individual points are highly correlated.