The global positioning system (GPS) can provide the daily coordinate time series to help geodesy and geophysical studies. However, due to logistics and malfunctioning, missing values are often “seen” in GPS time series, especially in polar regions. Acquiring a consistent and complete time series is the prerequisite for accurate and reliable statical analysis. Previous imputation studies focused on the temporal relationship of time series, and only a few studies used spatial relationships and/or were based on machine learning methods. In this study, we impute 20 Greenland GPS time series using missForest, which is a new machine learning method for data imputation. The imputation performance of missForest and that of four traditional methods are assessed, and the methods’ impacts on principal component analysis (PCA) are investigated. Results show that missForest can impute more than a 30-day gap, and its imputed time series has the least influence on PCA. When the gap size is 30 days, the mean absolute value of the imputed and true values for missForest is 2.71 mm. The normalized root mean squared error is 0.065, and the distance of the first principal component is 0.013. missForest outperforms the other compared methods. missForest can effectively restore the information of GPS time series and improve the results of related statistical processes, such as PCA analysis.

Tropospheric delay is an important error source in global positioning systems (GPS), and the water vapor retrieved from the tropospheric delay is widely used in meteorological research such as climate analysis and weather forecasting. Most zenith tropospheric delay (ZTD) models are presently used as positioning corrections, and few models are used for the estimation of water vapor, especially in Antarctica. Through two blind source separation algorithms (principal component analysis (PCA) and independent component analysis (ICA)), a back-propagation (BP) neural network and a deep learning technique (long short-term memory (LSTM) network), we establish an hourly high-accuracy ZTD model for GPS meteorology using the GPS-ZTD from 52 GPS stations in West Antarctica. Our results show that under the condition in which the principal components (PCs) and independent components (ICs) remain fixed after decomposition, the mean accuracy of the models for West Antarctica using PCA or ICA are better than 10 mm. Compared with the ZTDs from the nonmodeling stations, the mean root mean square (RMS) of the PCA and ICA models are 9.3 and 8.9 mm, respectively, and the correlation coefficients between the GPS-ZTD and model-ZTDs all exceed 90%. The accuracy of the ICA model is slightly higher than that of the PCA model, and the ICs of the ICA model show more consistent spatial responses. The six-hour forecast is the best among the forecast results, with a mean correlation coefficient of 90.6% and a mean RMS of 7.2 mm using GPS-ZTD. The long-term forecast result is significantly inaccurate, as the correlation coefficient between the 24-h forecast and GPS-ZTD is only 63.2%. Generally modest results have been achieved (HSS ≤ 0.38). Furthermore, the forecast accuracy in coastal areas is lower than that in inland areas. Our study confirms that the combined use of ICA and deep learning in ZTD modeling can effectively restore the original signals, and short-term forecasting can be effectively used in GPS meteorology. However, further development of the technology is necessary.

Dome A, the highest point on the Antarctic ice sheet at just over 4000 ma.s.l., is located near the centre of East Antarctica. Chinese National Antarctic Research Expeditions have studied ice-sheet dynamics and mass balance along a traverse route from Zhongshan station to Dome A during the austral summers from 1996/97 to 2004/05. Nineteen GPS sites were occupied on at least two occasions at approximately 50 km intervals. The purpose of the surveys was to provide accurate ice-dynamics data. A dual-frequency GPS receiver was used and each site was occupied for 1–12 hours. GPS data were processed using GAMIT/GLOBK software, and horizontal accuracies were within 0.1 m. Repeat GPS measurements provided ice velocities. The horizontal surface ice velocities increase from the summit of the ice sheet to the coast. In the Dome A area, the velocities are <10ma^–1; in the plateau area, velocities range from 8 to 24 ma^–1 and reach about 98.2 ma^–1 at a site (LT980) near the coast. The flow directions are roughly perpendicular to the ice-sheet surface elevation contours, primarily toward the Lambert Glacier basin.

The common mode error (CME) and optimal noise model are the two most important factors affecting the accuracy of time series in regional Global Navigation Satellite System (GNSS) networks. Removing the CME and selecting the optimal noise model can effectively improve the accuracy of GNSS coordinate time series. The CME, a major source of error, is related to the spatiotemporal distribution; hence, its detrimental effects on time series can be effectively reduced through spatial filtering. Independent component analysis (ICA) is used to filter the time series recorded by 79 GPS stations in Antarctica from 2010 to 2018. After removing stations exhibiting strong local effects using their spatial responses, the filtering results of residual time series derived from principal component analysis (PCA) and ICA are compared and analyzed. The Akaike information criterion (AIC) is then used to determine the optimal noise model of the GPS time series before and after ICA/PCA filtering. The results show that ICA is superior to PCA regarding both the filter results and the consistency of the optimal noise model. In terms of the filtering results, ICA can extract multisource error signals. After ICA filtering, the root mean square (RMS) values of the residual time series are reduced by 14.45%, 8.97%, and 13.27% in the east (E), north (N), and vertical (U) components, respectively, and the associated speed uncertainties are reduced by 13.50%, 8.06% and 11.82%, respectively. Furthermore, different GNSS time series in Antarctica have different optimal noise models with different noise characteristics in different components. The main noise models are the white noise plus flicker noise (WN+FN) and white noise plus power law noise (WN+PN) models. Additionally, the spectrum index of most PN is close to that of FN. Finally, there are more stations with consistent optimal noise models after ICA filtering than there are after PCA filtering.

Arctic sea ice variations are sensitive to Arctic environmental changes and global changes. Freeboard and thickness are two important parameters in sea ice change research. Satellite altimetry can provide long-time and large-scale sea ice monitoring. We estimated the Arctic sea ice freeboard and its variations for the period from 2002 to 2012 from Envisat satellite altimetry data. To remove geoid undulations, we reprocessed the Envisat data using a newly developed mean sea surface (MSS) model, named DTU18. Residuals in the static geoid were removed by using the moving average technique. We then determined the local sea surface height and sea ice freeboard from the Envisat elevation profiles. We validated our freeboard estimates using two radar freeboard products from the European Space Agency (ESA) Climate Change Initiative (CCI) and the Alfred Wegener Institute (AWI), as well as the Operation IceBridge (OIB) sea ice freeboard product. The overall differences between our estimates and the CCI and AWI data were 0.11 ± 0.14 m and 0.12 ± 0.14 m, respectively. Our estimates show good agreement with the three products for areas of freeboard larger than 0.2 m and smaller than 0.3 m. For areas of freeboard larger than 0.3 m, our estimates correlate better with OIB freeboard than with CCI and AWI. The variations in the Arctic sea ice thickness are discussed. The ice freeboard reached its minimum in 2008 during the research period. Sharp decreases were found in the winters of 2005 and 2007.

Global Positioning System (GPS) provides critical geodetic constraints on Earth's elastic response induced by ice and other mass loadings in Greenland. Previous studies focused on long‐term ice mass changes, with relatively fewer studies on transient signals and had used fewer GPS stations. Here we reconstructed 44 Greenland‐wide coastal decadal GPS time series using multichannel singular spectral analysis and quantified the origins of spatiotemporal patterns of transient to seasonal signals. We used an exhaustive list of geophysical processes, including surface mass balance (SMB), atmospheric pressure, continental hydrology, nontidal ocean loading, bedrock thermal expansion, precipitation, runoff, and ice discharge, and identified that most of Greenland's GPS sites exhibit SMB‐induced transient signals during 2012–2015, with maximum displacement reaching 20.45 mm. Analyses of differenced time series between adjacent GPS stations near peripheral glaciers reveal that locally varying seasonal signals are primarily attributable to SMB, followed by atmosphere.