Theoretical Research Of Atmospheric Loading

The theory of Farrell[1972] is customarily adopted to study the deformation of the Earth. The Green's functions of Farrell[1972] describe the deformation of the Earth under the action of gravitational attraction and pressure of an unit point mass located at Earth's surface. They are developed for computing the quantities of deformation of the Earth due to the action of a thin layer of mass at Earth's surface by convoluting them with the density of mass. The most important case of this kind is the ocean tide load. In the theory of Farrell[1972], the pressure at Earth's surface is produced by the mass located at the Earth's surface too, so gravitation and pressure are originated from the same position, thus both of them are treated together, and the effects of both of them are included in the load Love numbers defined for the problem. But in the case of atmospheric loading, the mass producing the pressure at Earth's surface is well above the Earth's surface, thus it is more feasible to treat the gravitation and the pressure separately.In this paper, we defined the pressure load Love numbers and the gravitation load Love numbers, and gave the expressions of the Green's functions. We also compute the load Love numbers and the Green's functions. As what is frequently done in similar problems, the spherically symmetrical, non-rotating, perfectly elastic and isotropic (SNREI) Earth model is adopted. Numerical values are computed using the preliminary reference Earth model (PREM).We also discussed the direct effect of the gravitation due to the atmospheric loading. We calculated the atmospheric gravity Green's functions, and discussed the effects of the temperature and topography.