Objectives  Global navigation satellite system (GNSS) technology is widely used in deformation monitoring such as dams, bridges, and landslides. In traditional monitoring methods, the reference stations need to be built, which leads to the increased monitoring cost.

  Methods  This paper proposes a GNSS deformation monitoring method based on virtual reference station (VRS), which uses the existing continuously operating reference stations (CORS) observation data to generate VRS instead of physical reference station to achieve high accuracy deformation monitoring. Firstly, the existing CORS observation data are used to obtain the atmospheric error correction models and generate VRS. Secondly, the baselines between VRS and each monitoring point are calculated. In order to further improve the accuracy of data processing, Delaunay triangulation networks are formed, and the baseline vector solution results are checked according to the criterion that the triangle closure error is zero. Finally, the checked baseline solution results are adjusted to obtain the final three-dimensional position coordinates of the monitoring points.

  Results  This paper uses about 30 monitoring points in Pingbian Miao Autonomous County, Yunnan Province for experimental analysis. The results show that the interpolation accuracis of the double-difference tropospheric and ionospheric delay are better than 10 mm if the distance between CORS reference stations is less than 40 km. The observation data longer than 8 hours can realize deformation monitoring with horizontal accuracy better than 5 mm and vertical accuracy better than 10 mm.

  Conclusions  The proposed method can realize the practical application of landslide monitoring. In the future, we can study how to improve the atmospheric error model and further improve the accuracy of data processing.