A QUICK LOOK ON THE VERTICAL MOVEMENTS OF PERMANENT GPS STATIONS IN THE GULF COASTAL AREA

Numerous studies have demonstrated that the U.S. Gulf Coast area is slowly subsiding at varying rates. Both natural and human-induced processes have played roles in the lowering of the land surface relative to sea level, which is slowly rising. During the past two decades, a great numbers of Continuously Operating Reference GPS Stations (CORS) had been installed by different agencies for different research and application purposes. This study aims to investigate subsidence in the coastal area using continuous observations from GPS stations. 26 CORS in the Gulf of Mexico were processed (the data archived at NGS CORS facility) spanning over a period of 10 years. These stations were close (within about 20 miles) to the shoreline of the Gulf of Mexico and spanned between Texas, Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, Florida and the Yucatan Peninsula in Mexico. The stations contained variable amounts of data, however, each station had about 10 consecutive years of daily measurements spanning in time as far back as 1994 to as recently as 2012. The data was processed using GIPSY processing software. Vertical position time series of these stations will be presented during this meeting.