The International DORIS Service July 2003 – December 2005 report

8.3 ANALYSIS TOOLS
8.3.1 CATREF DATA MODELLING AND ANALYSIS
IDS Report – July 2003 to December 2005 34
CATREF is a TRF combination software developed at the ITRS Product Center of IERS
(Altamimi et al., 2002). It is used here for referring a time series of sets of station coordinates
derived from space-geodetic techniques in a free network approach. The datum of the time
series of coordinates is set to ITRF2000 (Altamimi, Z., Sillard, P., Boucher, C., Feissel-Vernier,
M., 2004. IERS Technical Note 31) by aligning the Helmert transformation parameters and their
time derivatives for a subset of well observed reliable stations. The combination makes use of
the variance-covariance matrices of the individual sets of stations coordinates. This process
provides a unified series of TRFs, where the individual station velocities are not directly
constrained by the ITRF2000 one, and a series of translation, scale and rotation parameters
that can be used to study the global behavior of the DORIS terrestrial reference frame. The
series obtained in this way are marked in table 2. The other series were aligned by the IDS
Analysis Centers themselves, using a similar technique.
8.3.2 EXTRACTING SEASONAL AND LOW FREQUENCY COMPONENTS: THE
CRONO_VUE ALGORITHM
Crono_Vue is a time series visualizing tool. It extracts from the time series various components,
such as trend, cyclic and irregular components. It also analyses the spectral content and
performs Allan variance stability analyses. The cyclic components are extracted by numerical
filtering. The main output is graphical. Crono_Vue makes use of classical statistical concepts
that the reader will find in the papers listed in the references. The software source and
documentation, as well as examples of applications, are available through URL
http://lareg.ensg.ign.fr/IDS/software.html.
8.3.3 ALLAN VARIANCE
The Allan variance (Allan, D.W., 1966. Proc.IEEE 54, 221) may be defined as follows. Let us
consider a stochastic process whose realizations are available at a constant time interval time.
For a sampling time (being a multiple of:), we split the measurement time span into sub-samples
with length and we write the measurement as ) , i ∈{
1,
N − M + 1}
( X k
k = i,
i+
M −1