Real‐Time High‐Rate GNSS Displacements: Performance Demonstration during the 2019 Ridgecrest, California, Earthquakes

Traditional real-time seismology has relied on inertial sensors to characterize ground motions and earthquake sources, particularly for hazards applications such as warning systems. In the past decade, a revolution in high-rate, real-time Global Navigation Satellite System (GNSS) displacement have provided a new source of data to augment traditional measurement devices. The Ridgecrest, California earthquake sequence in 2019 provided one of the most complete recordings of real-time GNSS displacements to date, helping to aid in an initial source characterization over the first few days. In this manuscript, we analyze and make available the archived real-time displacement streams and compare their performance to post-processed results, which we also provide. We find good agreement for all stations showing a noticeable signal. This demonstrates that simple modeling in real-time, such as peak ground displacement scaling, would be practically identical to post-processed results. Similarly, we find good agreement across the full spectral range, from the coseismic offsets (~0 Hz) to the Nyquist frequency. We also find low latency between the measurement acquisition at the field site and the position calculation at the datacenter. In aggregate, the performance during the Ridgecrest earthquakes is strong evidence of the viability and usefulness of real-time GNSS as a monitoring tool.