CATS: GPS coordinate time series analysis software

Abstract

Over the last 10 years, several papers have established that daily estimates of GPS coordinates are temporally correlated and it is therefore incorrect to assume that the observations are independent when estimating parameters from them. A direct consequence of this assumption is the over-optimistic estimation of the parameter uncertainties. Perhaps the perceived computational burden or the lack of suitable software for time series analysis has resulted in many heuristic methods being proposed in the scientific literature for estimating these uncertainties. We present a standalone C program, CATS, developed to study and compare stochastic noise processes in continuous GPS coordinate time series and, as a consequence, assign realistic uncertainties to parameters derived from them. The name originally stood for Create and Analyze Time Series. Although the name has survived, the creation aspect of the software has, after several versions, been abandoned. The implementation of the method is briefly described to aid understanding and an example of typical input, usage, output and the available stochastic noise models are given.