Assessment of the Earth orientation parameter accuracy from concurrent VLBI observations

TL;DR

This study evaluates the accuracy of Earth orientation parameters derived from concurrent VLBI observations, revealing seasonal variations, limited impact of scheduling strategies, and the influence of atmospheric noise and source structure on measurement precision.

Contribution

It provides a comprehensive assessment of factors affecting EOP accuracy, including seasonal effects, atmospheric noise, and source structure, using concurrent VLBI data.

Findings

EOP errors are smaller in winter and larger in summer.

Scheduling strategies do not significantly improve EOP accuracy.

EOP errors scale with session duration following a broken power law.

Abstract

We have assessed accuracy of estimates of Earth orientation parameters (EOP) determined from several very long baseline interferometry (VLBI) observing programs that ran concurrently at different networks. We consider that the root mean square of differences in EOP estimates derived from concurrent observations is a reliable measure of accuracy. We confirmed that formal errors based on the assumption that the noise in observables is uncorrelated have a limited use. We found no evidence that advanced scheduling strategies with special considerations regarding the ability to better solve for atmospheric path in zenith direction applied for 1-hr single-baseline sessions have any measurable impact on the accuracy of EOP estimates. From this, we conclude that there is a certain limit in our ability to solve for the atmospheric path delay using microwave observations themselves and a scheduling strategy is not the factor that impairs accuracy of EOP determination. We determined that EOP errors vary with season, being smaller in winter and greater in summer. We got the quantitative estimate of the impact of unmodeled source structure on EOP estimates and we found that the seasonal extra variance is one order of magnitude greater than the impact of source structure. We have established that the EOP errors are scaled with an increase in duration of an observing session as a broken power law with the power of -0.3 at durations longer than 2-4 hours, which we explain as a manifestation of the presence of correlations in the atmospheric noise.