Sub-daily alias and draconitic errors in the IGS orbits

Harmonic signals with a fundamental period near the GPS draconitic year (351.2 days) and overtones up to at least the sixth multiple have been observed in the power spectra of nearly all products of the International GNSS Service (IGS), including station position time series, apparent geocenter motions, orbit jumps between successive days, and midnight discontinuities in earth orientation parameter (EOP) rates. Two main mechanisms have been suggested for the harmonics: mismodeling of orbit dynamics and aliasing of near-sidereal local station multipath effects. Others have studied the propagation of local multipath errors into draconitic position variations, but orbit-related processes have been less examined. We elaborate our earlier analysis of GPS day-boundary orbit discontinuities where we observed some draconitic features as well as prominent spectral bands near 29-, 14-, 9-, and 7-day periods. Finer structures within the sub-seasonal bands fall close to the expected alias frequencies for 24-h sampling of sub-daily EOP tide lines but do not coincide precisely. While once-per-revolution empirical orbit parameters should strongly absorb any sub-daily EOP tide errors due to near-resonance of their respective periods, the observed differences require explanation. This has been done by simulating EOP tidal errors and checking their impact on a long series of estimated daily GPS orbits and EOPs. Indeed, simulated tidal aliases are found to be very similar to the observed IGS orbital features in the sub-seasonal bands. Moreover and unexpectedly, some low draconitic harmonics were also produced, potentially a source for the widespread errors in most IGS products. The results from this study are further evidence for the need of an improved sub-daily EOP tide model.     

Impact of loading displacements on SLR-derived parameters and on the consistency between GNSS and SLR results

Displacements of the Earth’s surface caused by tidal and non-tidal loading forces are relevant in high-precision space geodesy. Some of the corrections are recommended by the international scientific community to be applied at the observation level, e.g., ocean tidal loading (OTL) and atmospheric tidal loading (ATL). Non-tidal displacement corrections are in general recommended not to be applied in the products of the International Earth Rotation and Reference Systems Service, in particular atmospheric non-tidal loading (ANTL), oceanic and hydrological non-tidal corrections. We assess and compare the impact of OTL, ATL and ANTL on SLR-derived parameters by reprocessing 12 years of SLR data considering and ignoring individual corrections. We show that loading displacements have an influence not only on station long-term stability, but also on geocenter coordinates, Earth Rotation Parameters, and satellite orbits. Applying the loading corrections reduces the amplitudes of annual signals in the time series of geocenter and station coordinates. The general improvement of the SLR station 3D coordinate repeatability when applying OTL, ATL and ANTL corrections are 19.5 %, 0.2 % and 3.3 % respectively, w.r.t. the solutions without loading corrections. ANTL corrections play a crucial role in the combination of optical (SLR) and microwave (GNSS, VLBI, DORIS) space geodetic observation techniques, because of the so-called Blue-Sky effect: SLR measurements can be carried out only under cloudless sky conditions—typically during high air pressure conditions, when the Earth’s crust is deformed, whereas microwave observations are weather-independent. Thus, applying the loading corrections at the observation level improves SLR-derived products as well as the consistency with microwave-based results. We assess the Blue-Sky effect on SLR stations and the consistency improvement between GNSS and SLR solutions when ANTL corrections are included. The omission of ANTL corrections may lead to inconsistencies between SLR and GNSS solutions of up to 2.5 mm for inland stations. As a result, the estimated GNSS–SLR coordinate differences correspond better to the local ties at the co-located stations when applying ANTL corrections.     

Negotiating on location, timing, duration, and participant in agent-mediated joint activity-travel scheduling

Agent-based simulation has become an important modeling approach in activity-travel analysis. Social activities account for a large amount of travel and have an important effect on activity-travel scheduling. Participants in joint activities usually have various options regarding location, participants, and timing and take different approaches to make their decisions. In this context, joint activity participation requires negotiation among agents involved, so that conflicts among the agents can be addressed. Existing mechanisms do not fully provide a solution when utility functions of agents are nonlinear and non-monotonic. Considering activity-travel scheduling in time and space as an application, we propose a novel negotiation approach, which takes into account these properties, such as continuous and discrete issues, and nonlinear and non-monotonic utility functions, by defining a concession strategy and a search mechanism. The results of experiments show that agents having these properties can negotiate efficiently. Furthermore, the negotiation procedure affects individuals’ choices of location, timing, duration, and participants.     

Uncovering spatiotemporal micromobility patterns through the lens of space–time cubes and GIS tools

Journal of Geographical Systems - In the past ten years, cities have experienced a burst of micromobility services as they offer a flexible transport option that allows users to cover short trips...     

Semantically Enriching an Open Source Sensor Observation Service Implementation for Accessing Heterogeneous Environmental Data Sources

Many kinds of environmental data are nowadays publicly available, but spread over the web. This article discusses using the Sensor Observation Service (SOS) standard of the Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) as a common interface for providing data from heterogeneous sources which can be integrated to a user tailored environmental information system. In order to allow for providing user‐tailored and problem‐specific information the adjusted SOS is augmented by a semantic layer which maps the environmental information to ontology concepts. The necessary information fusion from different domains and data types lead to several specific requirements for the SOS. Addressing these requirements we have implemented a SOS which still conforms to the OGC SOS 1.0.0 standard specification. The developed SOS has been integrated in a publicly available demonstrator of our personalized environmental information system. Additionally this article discusses future consequences for the SOS, caused by the recently published SOS 2.0 specification.     

Integrating a Raster Geographical Information System with Multi‐Objective Land Allocation Optimization for Conservation Reserve Design

The multi‐objective land allocation problem is to optimize the selection of land for different uses based on a set of decision objectives. For most applications, a geographical information system (GIS) is either absent or loosely coupled through file exchange. In this article the evolutionary algorithm (EA), a heuristic solution method for optimization problems, is integrated with a raster GIS to form a spatial decision support system (SDSS) for multi‐objective conservation reserve design. The SDSS effectively combines the functions of a GIS for data management, analysis, and visualization, with the optimization capability of the EA; and provides a uniform way to solve conservation reserve design problems with different types of constraints and objectives. The SDSS is demonstrated through application to the creation of conservation reserves in Bolivia to protect 17 endemic mammals.     

A Combined Biophysical and Economic GIS Framework to Assess Sugarcane Cropping Potential in Brazil

Recently, the increasing demand for biofuels triggered a new phase for the sugar‐alcohol sector. In Brazil, as well as in other tropical countries, this process raised worries regarding the possible direct and indirect effects of the crop's expansion on the conversion of native vegetation coverings. Therefore, the modeling of spatial‐economic surfaces, representing the potential rent variation in its spatial component, for economic activities, may be a useful tool in the decision‐making process. Hence, here we propose and present the results of a combined framework composed of two modules using the modeling platform Dinamica EGO. The first module simulates sugarcane's growth, calculating the daily response of the crop to environmental conditions during the stages of the plant's development. The second module estimates rents for sugarcane cultivation in Brazil, identifying areas where this activity would bring higher economic return, looking at simulated productivity, production costs and selling prices in a way that is spatially explicit for Brazil. Two different scenarios for production costs were tested, and results ranged from negative values to maxima of R$/ha 929 and R$/ha 1176 for standard and efficient costs of production, respectively. The model successfully indicated non‐profitable and profitable areas, and regions where high expected economic return overlaps endangered ecosystems.     

Phase center modeling for LEO GPS receiver antennas and its impact on precise orbit determination

Most satellites in a low-Earth orbit (LEO) with demanding requirements on precise orbit determination (POD) are equipped with on-board receivers to collect the observations from Global Navigation Satellite systems (GNSS), such as the Global Positioning System (GPS). Limiting factors for LEO POD are nowadays mainly encountered with the modeling of the carrier phase observations, where a precise knowledge of the phase center location of the GNSS antennas is a prerequisite for high-precision orbit analyses. Since 5 November 2006 (GPS week 1400), absolute instead of relative values for the phase center location of GNSS receiver and transmitter antennas are adopted in the processing standards of the International GNSS Service (IGS). The absolute phase center modeling is based on robot calibrations for a number of terrestrial receiver antennas, whereas compatible antenna models were subsequently derived for the remaining terrestrial receiver antennas by conversion (from relative corrections), and for the GNSS transmitter antennas by estimation. However, consistent receiver antenna models for space missions such as GRACE and TerraSAR-X, which are equipped with non-geodetic receiver antennas, are only available since a short time from robot calibrations. We use GPS data of the aforementioned LEOs of the year 2007 together with the absolute antenna modeling to assess the presently achieved accuracy from state-of-the-art reduced-dynamic LEO POD strategies for absolute and relative navigation. Near-field multipath and cross-talk with active GPS occultation antennas turn out to be important and significant sources for systematic carrier phase measurement errors that are encountered in the actual spacecraft environments. We assess different methodologies for the in-flight determination of empirical phase pattern corrections for LEO receiver antennas and discuss their impact on POD. By means of independent K-band measurements, we show that zero-difference GRACE orbits can be significantly improved from about 10 to 6 mm K-band standard deviation when taking empirical phase corrections into account, and assess the impact of the corrections on precise baseline estimates and further applications such as gravity field recovery from kinematic LEO positions.     

Automatic main road extraction from high resolution satellite imageries by means of particle swarm optimization applied to a fuzzy-based mean calculation approach

Manual extraction of road network by human operator is an expensive and time-consuming procedure. Alternatively, automation of the extraction process would be a great advancement. For this purpose, an automatic method is proposed to extract roads from high resolution satellite images. In this study, using few samples from road surface, a particle swarm optimization is applied to a fuzzy-based mean calculation system to obtain road mean values in each band of high resolution satellite colour images. Then, the images are segmented using the calculated mean values from the fuzzy system. Optimizing the fuzzy cost function by particle swarm optimization enables the fuzzy approach to be the best mean value of road with sub-grey level precision. Initially, this method was applied to simulated images where the calculated mean values are consistent with the hypothetic mean values. Application of the method to IKONOS satellite images has shown a prospective outcome for automatic road extraction. Mathematical morphology is subsequently used to extract an initial main road centreline from the segmented image. Then, small redundant segments are automatically removed. The quality of the extracted road centreline indicates the effectiveness of the proposed approach.