Study of the nutation of the Earth by VLBI and GNSS data analysis

  1. Puente García, Víctor
Supervised by:
  1. Marta Folgueira López Director

Defence university: Universidad Complutense de Madrid

Fecha de defensa: 05 March 2021

Committee:
  1. Pilar Romero Pérez Chair
  2. Gonzalo Barderas Secretary
  3. José Antonio López Fernández Committee member
  4. M. Esther Sardon Perez Committee member
  5. Elisa Felicitas Arias Committee member
Department:
  1. Física de la Tierra y Astrofísica

Type: Thesis

Abstract

The study of the nutation of the Earth is fundamental in two aspects: to infer the structure of the Earth’s interior and to determine the orientation of the Earth’s axis in the inertial frame.The observation of extragalactic radio sources by means of Very Long Baseline Interferometry (VLBI) is the only space geodetic technique that allows direct and accurate determination of the nutation on a regular basis. Analysis of VLBI observations allows us to estimate corrections to the IAU 2000A nutation model. These corrections are known as celestial pole offsets, and are part of the Earth Orientation Parameters (EOP), together with the polar motion components and the UT1-UTC difference. These EOP constitute the fundamental parameters used to describe the orientation of the Earth in space and this knowledge is required for the transformation between the International Terrestrial Reference System (ITRS) and the Geocentric Celestial Reference Sytem (GCRS)...