The Flow of the Yangtze River Inverted from a Continuous Global Navigation Satellite System Station

The runoff change in a large river is significant for hydrological event monitoring, such as floods and droughts. In this paper, we attempt to invert the river flow change based on the surface displacements observed by the continuous global navigation satellite system (GNSS) stations in the Wuhan section of the Yangtze River (WYR). We establish a two-dimensional model accounting for deformation from a line load in an elastic half-space to estimate the annual water load change from the GNSS data. The results show that the inverted line load from the annual maximum displacement change observed by the GNSS is Ne=2.30x10(8)N center dot m-1 , which is in good agreement with the river load from the hydrological station. This paper demonstrates a low-cost and practical method to river flow research in local areas, which is also a creative application for the GNSS.