Plots of closure delay, closure phase, and closure amplitude are provided for the geodetic very long baseline interferometry (VLBI) observations of the Continuous VLBI Campaign 2014 (CONT14) experiment of the International VLBI Service for Geodesy and Astrometry (IVS, https://ivscc.gsfc.nasa.gov/ , see https://ivscc.gsfc.nasa.gov/program/cont14/ for a description of CONT14, and see https://ivscc.gsfc.nasa.gov/about/org/components/dc-list.html for a list of IVS data centers from which the CONT14 data can be downloaded) as calculated by Anderson and Xu for their article titled _Source Structure and Measurement Noise Are as Important as All Other Residual Sources in Geodetic VLBI Combined_, submitted to the Journal of Geophysical Research - Solid Earth in 2018.Closure quantities are insensitive to station-based calibration terms, such as station clock errors, atmospheric delay errors, phase offsets, station position errors, amplitude calibration errors, and so on, and as a result are sensitive only to source structure (the two-dimensional brightness distribution of source emission on the sky, which is typically time and frequency dependent), measurement noise, and closure errors such as bandpass mismatch and polarization leakage. We used closure quantities derived from the CONT14 data to investigate the amount of source structure present in the celestial sources observed in the CONT14 experiment.Details:Three data files are included:(1) closure_delay_Anderson_Xu_JGR_2018.tar.gz(2) closure_phase_Anderson_Xu_JGR_2018.tar.gz(3) closure_amplitude_Anderson_Xu_JGR_2018.tar.gzThe file with the name starting with "closure_delay" contains closure delay plots, the file with the name starting with "closure_phase" contains closure phase plots, and so on. These three files are collections of files made by the UNIX tar program that have been compressed with the gzip program.
Very Long Baseline Interferometry (VLBI) is a primary space-geodetic technique for determining precise coordinates on the Earth, for monitoring the variable Earth rotation and orientation with highest precision, and for deriving many other parameters of the Earth system. The International VLBI Service for Geodesy and Astrometry (IVS, http://ivscc.gsfc.nasa.gov/) is a service of the International Association of Geodesy (IAG) and the International Astronomical Union (IAU).
The datasets published here are the results of individual Very Long Baseline Interferometry (VLBI) sessions in the form of normal equations in SINEX 2.0 format (http://www.iers.org/IERS/EN/Organization/AnalysisCoordinator/SinexFormat/sinex.html, the SINEX 2.0 description is attached as pdf) provided by IVS as the input for the next release of the International Terrestrial Reference System (ITRF): ITRF2014. This is a new version of the ITRF2008 release (Böckmann et al., 2009).
For each session/ file, the normal equation systems contain elements for the coordinate components of all stations having participated in the respective session as well as for the Earth orientation parameters (x-pole, y-pole, UT1 and its time derivatives plus offset to the IAU2006 precession-nutation components dX, dY (https://www.iau.org/static/resolutions/IAU2006_Resol1.pdf). The terrestrial part is free of datum. The data sets are the result of a weighted combination of the input of several IVS Analysis Centers.
The IVS contribution for ITRF2014 is described in Bachmann et al (2015), Schuh and Behrend (2012) provide a general overview on the VLBI method, details on the internal data handling can be found at Behrend (2013).