Effects of Climate Change on Earth’s Parameters

An Example of Exabyte-sized System

Giampiero Sindoni

, Erricos. C. Pavlis

, Claudio Paris

3,1

, Antonio Paolozzi

1,3

and Ignazio Ciufolini

4,3

Scuola di Ingegneria Aerospaziale, Sapienza University of Rome, Via Salaria 851, 00138 Rome, Italy

Joint Center for Earth Systems Technology (JCET/UMBC), University of Maryland,

Baltimore County and NASA Goddard, 1000 Hilltop Circle Baltimore, 21250 Maryland, U.S.A.

Museo Storico della Fisica e Centro Studi e Ricerce Enrico Fermi, Via Panisperna, 89, 00184 Rome, Italy

Dipartimento di Ingegneria dell’ Innovazione, Universit

a del Salento, Via per Monteroni, 73100 Lecce, Italy

Keywords:

Climate Change, Earth Orientation Parameters, Gravity Variations, Space Geodetic Techniques, Big Data,

ITRF.

Abstract:

Climate change at global scale affects Earth characteristics that can be detected by measuring global param-

eters such as Earth rotation and centre of mass variations. Similarly, changes in the harmonics of Earth’s

gravitational ﬁeld model are an indication of environmental changes and provide a measure of the mass redis-

tributions causing these variations. There are four independent space geodetic techniques today that monitor

Earth’s geometric and dynamic parameters very accurately: Very Long Baseline Interferometry (VLBI), Satel-

lite/Lunar Laser Ranging (SLR/LLR), Global Navigation Satellite Systems (GNSS) and Doppler Orbitography

and Radiopositioning Integrated by Satellite (DORIS). These techniques have been operational for decades,

collecting a very large amount of data that after appropriate processing provide, among other things, the Earth

geometric and dynamic parameters used in global climate change monitoring. The same techniques are also

necessary for the establishment and maintenance of the International Terrestrial Reference Frame (ITRF). To

make the large amount of data more easily usable, scientists and engineers employ reduction techniques to

signiﬁcantly reduce the amount of raw data with minimal loss of information. It will be shown that the total

amount of data available today is of the order of exabyte. Due to the complexity of data management and

processing several national and international bodies have been established.

1 INTRODUCTION

Very Long Baseline Interferometry (VLBI), Satel-

lite Laser Ranging (SLR), Global Navigation Satel-

lite Systems (GNSS) and Doppler Orbitography and

Radiopositioning Integrated by Satellite (DORIS) al-

though each can provide independent Earth parame-

ters, the combination of their data allows to negate

the weaknesses and complement the strengths of the

individual techniques. The ﬁrst two techniques are

the oldest and the available data span over periods of

more than three decades. Processing is usually per-

formed using the longest time series constructed go-

ing back to the oldest acquisitions. This improves

conﬁdence on the analysis that are substantially based

on ﬁtting the models of the Earth parameters evolu-

tion with the data.

The complexity involved in integrating the four

techniques is very high. In fact the planning and oper-

ational management for the acquisition, storage, dis-

tribution, quality check, data formatting, and adher-

ence to standards is the task of international bodies

established as Services as will be described in detail

in section 3. While GNSS have a mass market the

other three techniques are more institutional oriented

and in particular SLR that is devoted mainly to studies

on geodesy but also to fundamental physics (Ciufolini

et al., 2013b) and gravitational physics (Bosco et al.,

2007). In particular the use of the orbital parame-

ters of the two LAGEOS satellites allowed an accurate

measurement of the Lense-Thirring effect, a manifes-

tation of frame-dragging (Ciufolini et al., 2012b; Ciu-

folini and Ricci, 2002) of the General Relativity the-

ory, with an accuracy of about 10% (Ciufolini et al.,

1998; Ciufolini and Pavlis, 2004). LARES is the lat-

est laser ranged satellite (Paolozzi et al., 2015), it has

been funded by the Italian Space Agency (ASI) and

launched on February 13, 2012 (Paolozzi et al., 2012;

Sindoni, G., Pavlis, E., Paris, C., Paolozzi, A. and Ciufolini, I.

Effects of Climate Change on Earth’s Parameters - An Example of Exabyte-sized System.

In Proceedings of the 1st International Conference on Complex Information Systems (COMPLEXIS 2016), pages 131-138

ISBN: 978-989-758-181-6

131

Paolozzi and Ciufolini, 2013) by the VEGA launcher

provided by the European Space Agency (ESA). With

the addition of this new satellite the accuracy in the

measurement of the Lense-Thirring effect will be im-

proved by one order of magnitude as shown by a

Monte Carlo simulation (Ciufolini et al., 2013a), an

error analysis (Ciufolini et al., 2012a) and the results

of the preliminary orbital analysis (Ciufolini et al.,

2015). The ever increasing accuracy of the geodedic

techniques allow to detect very small variation of spin

axis, angular velocity and center of mass of the Earth.

Those small variations are related to several factors

among which the angular momentum exchange be-

tween the solid Earth and atmosphere which is not

perfectly co-rotating with the Earth because of winds,

air jets, tornadoes etc...(Kouba and Vondrk, 2005).

There have been also recent studies that found corre-

lation between Earth Rotation Parameters (ERP) vari-

ations and global climate change. (Lehmann et al.,

2009). Some more details on Earth global parameters

and climate change are reported in section 4.

2 EARTH’S MOVEMENT

In this section we will describe the Earth’s movements

since they are more complex than what usually taught

in non-specialized courses. In fact besides the well-

known revolution around the Sun, and the rotation

about its axis of maximum inertia, there are other mo-

tions, some of which are induced by external forces

and internal mass redistribution.

In the body reference frame (Terrestrial Refer-

ence Frame – TRF) there is the polar motion and the

length-of-day variations, as well as variations of the

center of mass due to mass redistribution in the Earth

system (mostly seasonal), while in the Celestial Ref-

erence Frame (CRF), there are additional motions:

precession, nutation and free-core nutation. Usually

when referring to the body ﬁxed reference frame, one

considers the Earth Rotation Parameters (ERP), be-

cause the EOP include also precession and nutation.

2.1 ITRF and EOP

Earth orientation parameters, center of mass varia-

tions and scale are the essential elements that deﬁne

the terrestrial reference frame that can have different

realizations based on each individual space geodetic

technique. The best realization of course is the one

obtained after the combination of the data from all

four techniques, since the combination beneﬁts from

the information provided by each one and eliminates

the weaknesses of each technique. There is already a

large amount of data from each of the techniques used

in the development of these reference frames. The de-

velopment of the ITRF involves the data from all four

techniques, so a quadruple amount of data.

The current version of the ITRF, called ITRF2008,

has been obtained using data collected from 934 sta-

tions in 580 sites (463 of which in the northern hemi-

sphere) and distributed among the four techniques as

follows: 29 years of VLBI data, 26 years of SLR data,

12.5 years of GPS data, and 16 years of DORIS data.

84 sites have the co-location of at least two of the four

techniques.

3 GEODETIC TECHNIQUES

The huge amount of data and the complex relation

among the data and the owners made necessary the es-

tablishment of international bodies established as Ser-

vices under the International Association of Geodesy

(IAG) and comprising several working groups for

each individual technique. The coordination of activ-

ities of these Services is the task of their Governing

Boards and Central Bureaus, while high-level guid-

ance is provided by IAG. The operative part of IAG

is the Global Geodetic Observing System (GGOS)

that plans, designs, and advocates for the required

infrastructure of all observing techniques. The data

are available through the global data centers of each

Service, one of which is the Crustal Dynamics Data

Information System (CDDIS) located at the Goddard

Space Flight Center, and the only data center that

archives the data from all four Services. In particular

the CDDIS provides online access to the GNSS data

and products generated by the International GNSS

Service (IGS). The organizations that speciﬁcally deal

with the four techniques are listed in Table 1. The Ser-

vices are also devoted to data analysis and each one

has an analysis working group that coordinates these

activities.

Table 1: Organizations speciﬁcally devoted to the single

geodetic techniques.

Organization Acronym Technique

International VLBI

Service for Geodesy

and Astrometry

IVS VLBI

International GNSS

Service

IGS GNSS

International Laser

Ranging Service

ILRS SLR/LRR

International DORIS

Service

IDS DORIS

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132

IVS is a service of the International Association

of Geodesy (IAG) and of the International Astro-

nomical Union (IAU). VLBI has been exclusively

ground based (the attempt to increase the baseline

performed with the Japanese HALCA space borne

radio-telescope provided limited results and the cur-

rently operating Russian Radioastron spacecraft has

been used for astrometric observations only), while

SLR/LLR, GNSS and DORIS need necessarily an op-

erating space segment, besides the ground-based in-

struments. In the case of SLR/LLR the space seg-

ment can be purely passive. GNSS has an active space

and ground segments. The GNSS constellations are

continuously increasing due to the massive market of

applications in navigators and to the will of Europe,

China, India and Japan (the last two with two regional

systems) to be independent of the GPS (USA) and/or

GLONASS (Russia) systems.

In this section the four techniques, including an esti-

mate of size of data, are described.

3.1 VLBI

VLBI is a measuring technique that uses radio-

telescopes located on the Earth surface to observe ra-

dio signals from extragalactic sources (quasars) which

are at practically inﬁnite distance from Earth (Figure

1). The difference in arrival times of the same signal

at two telescopes carries information about the length

of the baseline between the two telescopes. By ob-

serving several quasars in different directions from a

pair of telescopes, we can infer the length and abso-

lute direction of the baseline between the two tele-

scopes. Doing so from a global network of such tele-

scopes allows to determine the shape and size of the

network very accurately. Because the observations do

not depend on the absolute location of the network

in space (due to the inﬁnite distance of the sources,

VLBI does not sense the location of the geocenter,

nor its variations. On the other hand, since the quasars

form a quasi-inertial frame, VLBI can observe preces-

sion, nutation and free-core nutation, and determine

the absolute orientation of Earth in space that are the

primary contributions of VLBI in the development of

the ITRF and the associated EOP series.

VLBI is the geodetic technique that collects the

largest amount of raw data to deliver its products. The

amount that it collects at present on a yearly basis for

the entire network is about 0.3 EB, and one could es-

timate that over its 30 yrs of existence, it has collected

well over 3 EB of data alone (the network was a lot

smaller in the early years).

IVS coordinates VLBI observing programs, sets

performance standards for VLBI stations, establishes

conventions for VLBI data formats and data products,

issues recommendations for VLBI data analysis soft-

ware, sets standards for VLBI analysis documenta-

tion, and institutes appropriate VLBI product deliv-

ery methods to ensure suitable product quality and

timeliness. IVS also coordinates its activities with the

astronomical community because of the dual use of

many VLBI facilities and technologies for both radio

astronomy and geodesy/astrometry.

3.2 SLR

Satellite Laser Ranging (SLR) and Lunar Laser Rang-

ing (LLR) use short-pulse lasers and state-of-the-art

optical receivers and timing electronics to measure

the two-way time of ﬂight (and hence distance) from

ground stations to retroreﬂector arrays on Earth or-

biting satellites and the Moon. Scientiﬁc products

derived using SLR and LLR data include precise

geocentric positions and motions of ground stations,

satellite orbits, components of Earths gravity ﬁeld and

their temporal variations, Earth Orientation Parame-

ters (EOP), precise lunar ephemerides and informa-

tion about the internal structure of the Moon. Laser

ranging systems are already measuring the one-way

distance to remote optical receivers in space and can

perform very accurate time transfer between sites far

apart.

The ILRS network (Figure 2) collects today

roughly 110 TB per year, and with some averaging

and considering the signiﬁcantly smaller network and

fewer number of target satellites, one can estimate

that over its 30 year existence, SLR has collected

about 1 PB or 10

−3

EB raw data. SLR is thus a much

more efﬁcient system, producing its products on the

basis of signiﬁcantly less raw information than VLBI.

Laser ranging activities are organized under the

International Laser Ranging Service (ILRS) which

provides global satellite and lunar laser ranging data

and their derived data products to support research in

geodesy, geophysics, Lunar science, and fundamen-

tal constants (Pearlman et al., 2002). This includes

data products that are fundamental to the International

Terrestrial Reference Frame (ITRF), which is estab-

lished and maintained by the International Earth Ro-

tation and Reference Systems Service (IERS). SLR

is the only technique that can determine accurately

and in an absolute sense the origin of the ITRF, i.e.

the geocenter, and along with VLBI, the scale of the

ITRF network of stations. These are the primary con-

tributions of SLR in the development of the ITRF,

with minor contributions in the determination of the

associated ERP series, especially as far as the long

wavelength signals. The ILRS develops the neces-

Effects of Climate Change on Earth’s Parameters - An Example of Exabyte-sized System

133

Figure 1: VLBI sites, the global IVS network.

Figure 2: Stations of the International Laser Ranging Service (ILRS) global network.

sary global standards/speciﬁcations for laser ranging

activities and encourages international adherence to

its conventions.

3.3 GNSS

The Global Navigation Satellite Systems are constel-

lations of satellites (identical or very similar), that

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134

Figure 3: Stations of the IGS global network.

emit radio signals with encoded information, that can

be tracked by receivers located practically anywhere

(ground, sea, air, on static or moving platforms), in

order to determine their position, velocity and time.

In simple terms, the technique used is based on solv-

ing a point-positioning problem from the measure-

ment of at least four simultaneous pseudorange (bi-

ased range) measurements to four different satellites

from the same receiver. These allow for the de-

termination of the observer’s position and the time-

difference between the receiver’s clock and the time

kept by the satellites atomic clocks. For higher accu-

racy, scientiﬁc receivers collect also phase measure-

ments for each signal and at two different frequencies,

so that ionospheric delay effects can be calibrated out.

Further modeling or estimation of the tropospheric

delay in the observed signals allows to reach ultra pre-

cise levels, delivering geodetic products with an accu-

racy of a few millimetres.

Since 1994 the International GNSS service (IGS)

provides GNSS products that are used for many ap-

plications including the realization of the ITRF. The

number of stations has continuously increased reach-

ing today 500 units (Figure 3). The IGS supports

research for the continuous development of new ap-

plications and products through Working Groups and

Pilot Projects supporting geodetic research and schol-

arly publications. Using average data collection esti-

mates, we can infer that the GNSS network collects

some 25 TB of raw data per year in the current state.

The network and the available satellites were signif-

icantly smaller in size/number in the early years, so

taking that into account, the entire lot of data collected

since the early 90s is roughly 0.5 PB or 0.5 ×10

−3

raw data, again, similar in order of magnitude to the

SLR raw data set.

3.4 DORIS

The Doppler Orbitography and Radiopositioning In-

tegrated by SatelliteDORIS system is a French civil

precise orbit determination and positioning system

(Figure 4). It is based on the principle of the Doppler

effect with a network of transmitting terrestrial bea-

cons and on-board instruments on the satellite’s pay-

load (antenna, radio receiver and ultra-stable oscilla-

torUSO).

DORIS is one of three systems used for precise

determination of the Jason-1 satellite’s orbit. Several

of these techniques are sometimes onboard the same

satellite: Jason-1 satellite includes three tracking sys-

tems, DORIS, GPS and SLR array. The DORIS sys-

tem perfectly corresponds to the speciﬁcations re-

quired for the ocean’s topography observations and

the amplitude of the observed phenomena: it now

enables to measure the satellite position on its orbit

close to 1 cm. It is interesting to compare this pre-

cision with the precision obtained at the beginning of

the space age, where the satellite position was esti-

mated close to 20 km, then close to 20 meters in the

80’s. Since 1998, the Diode navigator has added real-

time measurement processing capability for satellite

navigation.

The DORIS system was designed by CNES, the

Effects of Climate Change on Earth’s Parameters - An Example of Exabyte-sized System

135

Figure 4: DORIS stations co-located with other IERS techniques (VLBI, SLR or GNSS).

French space agency, in partnership with France’s

mapping and survey agency IGN and the space

geodesy research institute GRGS. The successive

missions since Spot 2 and Topex/Poseidon have truly

demonstrated its performance. It is currently on-

board the Cryosat-2, Jason-2, HY-2A and SARAL

altimetric satellites and the remote sensing satellite

SPOT-5. It also ﬂew with SPOT-2, SPOT-3, SPOT-

4, TOPEX/POSEIDON, ENVISAT and Jason-1.

Since 2003, IDS is an international service that

supports science through DORIS data and products

for geodetic, geophysical, and other research and op-

erational activities. IDS contributes its products for

the development of the ITRF and with the newest

systems in orbit it can determine near-real time or-

bits onboard the platform carrying the system, thence

allowing the geolocation of the collected data (e.g.

sea-surface heights) in near-real time. The DORIS

system collects the raw data on-board the satellites

that carry DORIS receivers and subsequently down-

loads that data to the appropriate master stations of

the network for further processing and archiving. The

amount of collected data over the period of its exis-

tence is at the same order of magnitude as the GNSS,

perhaps a little lower, but in any event, by far less than

the dominating VLBI data set that deﬁnes the order of

magnitude and complexity of this observing system.

4 EXAMPLE OF EARTH

PARAMETER INFLUENCED BY

THE GLOBAL WARMING

Global warming is believed to occur faster than in the

recent past. This will cause an anomalous ice melt-

ing on polar ice caps and on Greenland. As a con-

sequence the rotation axis of the Earth will show an

anomalous drift. In Figure 5 are reported real data of

polar motion, i.e. the intersection of the Earth rotation

axis with the Earth surface as seen from an observer

ﬁxed with the Earth. The graph has been obtained also

using about two years of LARES data. The circular

path is the Chandler wobble that can be qualitatively

explained by solving the rigid body Euler equations

in the torque free case. The variation in diameter of

the polar motion is due to a beating phenomenon with

an annual forcing component. The slow drift of the

center is mainly attributed to the post glacial rebound

(the slow recovery of the ground after the release of

the weight after the glacial era). The change in direc-

tion of this drift that occurred in 2005 is attributed to

accelerated ice melting in polar ice caps and Green-

land (Chen et al., 2013). Besides polar motion also

gravitational harmonics of the Earth gravity ﬁeld and

position of the center of mass are affected by global

changes (Pavlis et al., 2015a; Pavlis et al., 2015b; Sin-

doni et al., ). We report for the sake of clarity the dis-

placement of the center of mass of the Earth (Figure

6). The analysis was performed using SLR data of

the last 25 years. The results, taken from (Pavlis et

al., 2015a), show clearly the accuracy that is below 1

mm. We observe predominantly annual oscillations

with an amplitude of ∼3 mm in X and Y, and ∼5

mm in Z. These are caused by the redistribution of

mass during the year between the northern and south-

ern hemispheres, thence the larger Z-component am-

plitude.

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136

Figure 5: Polar motion from 1962 (Pavlis et al., 2015b).

Figure 6: Components of the center of mass obtained ana-

lyzing SLR data from 1990 to 2015 including the last two

years of LARES data (Pavlis et al., 2015a).

5 CONCLUSIONS

The four geodetic techniques described constitute an

exabyte size system. The data analysis provides,

among other things, Earth global parameters such as

spin axis and center of mass of the Earth. The accu-

racy of the combined techniques allow to reach mil-

limiter accuracy that are capable to signal events such

as accelerating ice melting in Greenland or sea level

rise in part of the globe due to global climate change.

When we add up all the data collected by all four

space geodetic techniques, VLBI, SLR, GNSS and

DORIS, the amount of data products that they deliver

to IERS/ITRS for the development of the ITRF and

its associated EOP series, reaches the level of about

3.5 EB, dominated by the VLBI data. As the net-

works of all techniques expand to meet the goals of

the next generation networks as outlined by GGOS

and considering the exponentially increasing number

of satellite targets due to the proliferation of naviga-

tion constellations (Galileo, BeiDou and IRNSS are

all launching new satellites with a fully operational

state by 2020 or so), we can easily predict that this

global geodetic observing system will surpass the cur-

rent 3.5 EB of data and perhaps reach the 5 EB level

by 2020.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

The authors acknowledge the supported by the Ital-

ian Space Agency under contract 2015-021-R.0. E.C.

Pavlis acknowledges the support of NASA Grants

NNX09AU86G and NNX14AN50G. The authors

thanks the International Laser Ranging Service for

tracking LARES and providing the laser ranging data.

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