4 Things You Didn’t Know GPS Could Do

GPS除了定位，还有这些不为人知的功用

Over the last decade, faster and more accurate GPS devices have allowed scientists to illuminate how the ground moves during big earthquakes.

GPS has led to better warning systems for natural disasters such as flash floods and volcanic eruptions.And researchers have even MacGyvered some GPS receivers into acting as snow sensors, tide gauges and other unexpected tools for measuring Earth.

“People thought I was crazy when I started talking about these applications,” says Kristine Larson, a geophysicist at the University of Colorado Boulder.“Well, it turned out we were able to do it.”

Here are some surprising things scientists have only recently realized they could do with GPS.

Feel an earthquake

For centuries geoscientists have relied on seismometers, which measure how much the ground is shaking, to assess how big and how bad an earthquake is.

GPS receivers served a different purpose — to track geologic processes that happen on much slower scales, such as the rate at which Earth’s great crustal plates grind past one another in the process known as plate tectonics.

Scientists can squeeze extra information out of the signals that GPS satellites transmit to Earth.

Those signals arrive in two components.One is the unique series of ones and zeros, known as the code, that each GPS satellite transmits.The second is a shorter-wavelength “carrier” signal that transmits the code from the satellite.

Because the carrier signal has a shorter wavelength — a mere 20 centimeters — compared with the longer wavelength of the code, which can be tens or hundreds of meters, the carrier signal offers a high-resolution way to pinpoint a spot on Earth’s surface.

Monitor a volcano

Beyond earthquakes, the speed of GPS is helping officials respond more quickly to other natural disasters as they unfold.

Many volcano observatories, for example, have GPS receivers arrayed around the mountains they monitor, because when magma begins shifting underground that often causes the surface to shift as well.By monitoring how GPS stations around a volcano rise or sink over time, researchers can get a better idea about where molten rock is flowing.

Probe the snow

Some of the most unexpected uses of GPS come from the messiest parts of its signal — the parts that bounce off the ground.

For many years scientists had thought these reflected signals were nothing but noise, a sort of echo that muddied the data and made it hard to figure out what was going on.

But about 15 years ago Larson and others began wondering if they could take advantage of the echoes in scientific GPS receivers.She started looking at the frequencies of the signals that reflected off the ground and how those combined with the signals that had arrived directly at the receiver.

From that she could deduce qualities of the surface that the echoes had bounced off.“We just reverse-engineered those echoes,” says Larson.

This approach allows scientists to learn about the ground beneath the GPS receiver — for instance how much moisture the soil contains or how much snow has accumulated on the surface.(The more snow falls on the ground, the shorter the distance between the echo and the receiver.)

Analyze the atmosphere

Finally, GPS can tease out information about the sky overhead, in ways that scientists hadn’t thought possible until just a few years ago.Water vapor, electrically charged particles, and other factors can delay GPS signals traveling through the atmosphere, and that allows researchers to make new discoveries.

One group of scientists uses GPS to study the amount of water vapor in the atmosphere that is available to precipitate out as rain or snow.

Researchers have used these changes to calculate how much water is likely to fall from the sky in drenching downpours, allowing forecasters to fine-tune their predictions of flash floods in places like Southern California.

So GPS is useful for everything from ground shaking beneath your feet to snow falling from the sky.Not bad for something that was just supposed to help you find your way across town.

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4 Things You Didn’t Know GPS Could Do

GPS除了定位，还有这些不为人知的功用

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