Impact of Atmospheric Pressure Loading on Regional Crustal Deformation and Gravity Change

Atmospheric pressure loading needs to be considered due to the great impact on the proce-ssing of high precision geodetic observations data and related geophysical interpretation. In this study, we use the global atmospheric model and regional atmospheric pressure data on weather stations, and calculate the impact of atmospheric pressure loading on crustal deformation and gravity change in the Three Gorges region of China on the basis of the remove-restore method and spherical harmonic analysis method. The proposed method can effectively solve global-scale model data being applied to the region, to improve the utilization of local data and global pressure model. This study finds that the impact of atmospheric pressure loading on the vertical deformation in the spatial distribution is mainly on the long wave. The amplitude of annual variation is greater than 20 mm in the Three Gorges region. The magnitude of gravity change on the ground is generally not more than 10 μGal. However, the impact on the horizontal deformation is very little. The results of this study have important reference value for separating the atmospheric effects in the processing of GNSS data and gravity data, and for analyzing.