GPS monitoring of vertical ground motion in northern Ardenne–Eifel: five campaigns (1999–2003) of the HARD project

We present the HARD project of GPS monitoring of vertical ground motion in NE Ardenne and Eifel (western Europe). Its main purposes are to get a better insight into the present-day rates of vertical ground motion in intraplate settings and to identify the various causes of these motions. Since 1999, we have carried out yearly campaigns of simultaneous GPS measurements at 12 sites situated so as to sample the different tectonic subunits of the study area and especially to record potential displacements across the seismogenic Hockai fault zone. Five campaigns (1999–2003) have been processed currently. Key issues of the data processing with the Gamit software are discussed and first results are presented. Though temporally consistent in many cases, the obtained vertical motion rates are spatially highly variable. They are also much too high (several mm/year) to support a tectonic interpretation, and a long-term influence of groundwater level variations is proposed to account for the observed motions. This influence should be distinguished from seasonal variations and from inter-survey variations linked to the varying degree of soil and subsoil drying off during the successive spring surveys.