Improved performance of GNSS precise point positioning for high-rate seismogeodesy with recent BDS-3 and Galileo

The continuously developing Global Navigation Satellite Systems (GNSS), in particular with the latest operational BDS and Galileo, provide good opportunities to enhance the performance of precise positioning. This study evaluates the performance of high-rate precise point positioning (PPP) applied for seismogeodesy with very recent BDS and Galileo. The static experiments with 20-Hz GNSS data show that Galileo and BDS-3/BDS-2 achieve comparable performances, with average 3D RMS values of 0.6–1.3 cm and 0.8–1.2 cm, respectively. In the dynamic experiments, we use a single-axis earthquake simulator of Quanser Shake Table II to simulate seismic waveforms of real earthquakes and collect 20-Hz GNSS data to evaluate the PPP performance. Taking the displacements recorded by the embedded encoder of the shake table as the truth, the accuracies of PPP displacements during the seismic events are 4–8 mm for GPS, 6–9 mm for BDS-2, and 3–6 mm for Galileo and BDS-3/BDS-2. By combining BDS-3 with BDS-2, the positioning accuracy of BDS is improved by 50% with respect to BDS-2 only. Galileo and BDS-3/BDS-2 perform slightly better than GPS, which is likely because the two latest operational systems use the more precise passive hydrogen maser clocks and have lower signal-in-space range error. The multi-GNSS solutions with GPS + Galileo + BDS-3/BDS-2 further improve the accuracy reaching 2–5 mm. We also identify a scale factor in the high-rate PPP displacements, which is probably induced by the dynamic stress error and related to the oscillating frequency. The scale factor reaches the maximum of 1.71 at an oscillating frequency around 2.5 Hz and then descends as the frequency increases. The improved performance of high-rate PPP augmented by the recent BDS-3 and Galileo is helpful to improve the practical level of high-rate GNSS in seismogeodesy and expand its applications to many other high-rate and high-accuracy applications.