Observing global terrestrial water storage changes (TWSCs) from (inter-)seasonal to (multi-)decade time-scales is very important to understand the Earth as a system under natural and anthropogenic climate change. The primary goal of the Gravity Recovery And Climate Experiment (GRACE) satellite mission (2002–2017) and its follow-on mission (GRACE-FO, 2018–onward) is to provide time-variable gravity fields, which can be converted to TWSCs with km spatial resolution; however, the one year data gap between GRACE and GRACE-FO represents a critical discontinuity, which cannot be replaced by alternative data or model with the same quality. To fill this gap, we applied time-variable gravity fields (2013–onward) from the Swarm Earth explorer mission with low spatial resolution of km. A novel iterative reconstruction approach was formulated based on the independent component analysis (ICA) that combines the GRACE and Swarm fields. The reconstructed TWSC fields of 2003–2018 were compared with a commonly applied reconstruction technique and GRACE-FO TWSC fields, whose results indicate a considerable noise reduction and long-term consistency improvement of the iterative ICA reconstruction technique. They were applied to evaluate trends and seasonal mass changes (of 2003–2018) within the world’s 33 largest river basins.
In order to study in the field of the dynamics and continuous variations in the ionosphere, the ionospheric measurement tools such as ionosondes, incoherent scatter radars, satellites, and Global Positioning System (GPS) networks should be used. Total Electron Content (TEC) is a key parameter in the investigation and identification of ionosphere layer. From observations of dual frequency GPS receivers, the ionospheric TEC can be extracted. Global Ionospheric Maps (GIM) are auxiliary Maps for a study on ionosphere layer in around the world. It is necessary to produce the regional TEC map for precise studying of the ionospheric TEC. Bernese software is used to extract TEC by dual frequency GPS receivers. Regional modeling of ionospheric TEC by Artificial Neural Network (ANN) is a significant domain for prediction TEC at both single and double frequency GPS receivers. Five locations in Iran during the period of 2006-2010 were identified and used in the development of an input space and ANN architecture for the TEC modeling. The input space included the day number (seasonal variation), hour (diurnal variation), sunspot number (a measure of the solar activity) and magnetic index (a measure of magnetic activity). Based on the results, the ANN have capability and flexibility to model and to predict TEC. TEC predicted by ANN A (NN TEC) and TEC obtained from the IRI2007 version of the International Reference Ionosphere (IRI TEC) are compared during equinoxes and solstices. Results show that ANN predicts GPS TEC more accurately than the IRI over Iran. The IRI-2007 model is not a suitable method to produce TEC over IRAN.
In this study, we present a data processing framework to apply measurements of the Global Navigation Satellite System (GNSS) technique for analyzing and predicting the movements of civil structures such as bridges. The proposed approach reduces the noise level of GNSS measurements using the Kalman Filter (KF) approach and enables the estimation of static, semi-static, and dynamic components of the bridge’s movements using a series of analyses such as the temporal filtering and the Least Squares Harmonic Estimation (LS-HE). The numerical results indicate that by using a RTK-GNSS system the semi-static component is extracted with a Standard Deviation (STD) of 0.032, 0.048, and 0.06 m in the North, East, and Up (NEU) directions, while that of the dynamic component is 0.004, 0.003, and 0.01 m, respectively. Comparing the dominant frequencies of the bridge movements from LS-HE with those of the permanent stations provides information about the bridge’s stability. To predict its deflection, the Neural Network (NN) technique is tested to simulate the time-varying components, which are then compared with the safety limits, known by its design, to assess the structural health under usual load.