Dataset of daily vertical displacements observed by GPS between 1994 and 2023 for hydrogeodetic studies over Europe

Abstract. Europe is currently the fastest-warming continent in the world, and it has experienced frequent and severe weather events, which have led to extensive droughts and floods, with consequences for ecosystems, health, economy, and other sectors. During the past two decades, these hydrological extremes have been quantified using Terrestrial Water Storage (TWS) changes obtained from the Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment (GRACE) mission and its successor GRACE Follow-On. Unfortunately, GRACE/-FO-derived TWS changes do not have sufficient temporal and spatial resolutions for detailed analysis of sub-regional patterns or sub-monthly TWS changes over Europe, e.g., at the Eurostat NUTS 2 or 3 level. We suggest that both spatial and temporal resolutions could be enhanced in the future by using displacement time series observed at more than 6,000 permanent Global Positioning System (GPS) European stations. However, to turn this network into an observing system for TWS anomalies, GPS displacements must be carefully prepared in advance, and no useful dataset is available to our knowledge. Here we provide, for the first time, a quality-controlled dataset of long daily vertical displacement time series observed at 4,443 GPS antennas in Europe and surrounding regions between 1994 and 2023, after preprocessing and preselection to remove displacements seemingly unrelated to hydrospheric loading. We classify stations that pass our procedure as reference time series (benchmark datasets) with respect to hydrospheric changes. Three benchmark datasets are provided for use at different temporal scales: long-term (>1.1 years), seasonal (from 4 months to 1.4 years) and short-term (from 2 days to 5 months), even for the period of 8 years prior to GRACE (Klos and Bogusz, 2026). We show in this study that the displacements recorded by GPS stations included in the benchmark datasets (1) are to a great extent coherent with hydrological models, reflect accumulated precipitation records, and clearly reflect the influence of climate modes, (2) are mutually highly consistent on a regional scale and also consistent with the displacements determined by the InSAR (Interferometric Synthetic Aperture Radar) technique, (3) allow for the estimation of high-resolution TWS changes at all three temporal scales well, which matches closely with GRACE and ERA5-Land, potentially allowing for a better understanding of regional changes in the European hydrosphere.