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

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.Acknowledgement The authors thank Drs. A.A. Simkooei, M. Schmidt, and M.R. Craymer greatly for their constructive comments and suggestions, which improved the quality of the paper. This research was supported by National Science Council of Taiwan (contract number NSC-91-2211- E-002-085).