This article describes the processing strategy and the validation results of CODE's MGEX (COM) orbit and satellite clock solution including the satellite systems GPS, GLONASS, Galileo, BeiDou, and QZSS. The validation with orbit misclosures and SLR residuals shows that the orbits of the new systems Galileo, BeiDou, and QZSS are affected by modelling deficiencies with impact on the orbit scale (e.g., antenna calibration, Earth albedo, transmitter antenna thrust). Another weakness is the attitude and solar radiation pressure (SRP) modelling of satellites moving in the orbit normal mode-which is not yet correctly considered in the COM solution. Due to these issues we consider the current state COM solution as preliminary. We, however, use the long time series of COM products for identifying the challenges and for the assessment of model improvements. The latter is demonstrated on the example of the solar radiation pressure (SRP) model, which has been replaced by a more generalized model. The SLR validation shows that the new SRP model significantly improves the orbit determination of Galileo and QZSS satellites at times when the satellite's attitude is maintained by yaw-steering. The impact of this orbit improvement is also visible in the estimated satellite clocks-demonstrating the potential use of the new

S U M M A R YWe compared estimates of crustal velocities within Great Britain based on continuous global positioning system (CGPS) measurements to predictions from a model of glacial isostatic adjustment (GIA). The observed and predicted values for vertical motion are highly correlated indicating that GIA is the dominant geodynamic process contributing to this field. In contrast, motion of the Eurasian plate dominates the horizontal motion component. A model of plate motion was adopted to remove this signal in order to estimate intraplate horizontal motion associated with GIA. However, a coherent pattern of horizontal motion was not evident in the resulting velocity field. We adopted a recently published model of the British-Irish ice sheet to predict vertical crustal motion for a large number of spherically symmetric Earth viscosity models. Our results show that the adopted ice model is capable of producing a high-quality fit to the observations. The CGPS-derived estimates of vertical motion provide a useful constraint on the average value of viscosity within the upper mantle. Values of model lithospheric thickness and lower mantle viscosity are less well resolved, however. A suite of predictions based on an alternative ice model indicates that the vertical motion data are relatively insensitive to uncertainties in the ice loading history and so the constraints on upper mantle viscosity are robust.

S U M M A R YTwo independent continuous global positioning system (CGPS) processing strategies, based on a double-difference regional network and a globally transformed precise point positioning solution, provide horizontal and vertical crustal motion estimates for Great Britain. Absolute gravity and geological information from late Holocene sea level data further constrain the vertical motion estimates. For 40 CGPS stations we estimate station velocities and associated uncertainties using maximum likelihood estimation, assuming the presence of white and coloured noise. Horizontal station velocity estimates agree to <1 mm yr −1 between the two CGPS processing strategies and closely follow predicted plate motions. Residual velocities, generally <1 mm yr −1 , follow no regular pattern, that is, there is no discernible internal deformation, nor any dependence on station monumentation or time-series length. Vertical station velocity estimates for the two CGPS processing strategies agree to ∼1 mm yr −1 , but show an offset of ∼1 mm yr −1 with respect to the absolute gravity (AG) estimates. We attribute this offset to a bias related to known issues in current CGPS results and correct for it by AG-alignment of our CGPS estimates of vertical station velocity. Both CGPS estimates and AG-aligned CGPS estimates of present-day vertical crustal motions confirm the pattern of subsidence and uplift in Great Britain derived from Holocene sea level data for the last few thousand years: ongoing subsidence on Shetland, uplift in most areas of Scotland, and subsidence in large areas of England and Wales.

We assess the use of precise point positioning (PPP) within the Bernese GPS software (BSW) Version 5.0 over the period from 2000 to 2005. In our strategy, we compute a set of daily PPP solutions for international GNSS service (IGS) reference frame (IGb00) sites by fixing IGS final satellite orbits and clock products, followed by a Helmert transformation of these solutions into ITRF2000, forming a set of continuous position time series over the entire time span. We assess BSW PPP by comparing our set of transformation parameters with those produced by the IGS analysis centre coordinator (ACC) and our position time series with those of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) and the Scripps Orbit and Permanent Array Centre at the Scripps Institute of Oceanography (SIO). The distributions of the north (N), east (E) and up (U) daily position differences are characterized by means and SD of +2.2 ± 4.8, -0.6 ± 7.9 and +4.8 ± 17.3 mm with respect to JPL, and of +0.1 ± 4.4, -0.1 ± 7.4 and -0.1 ± 11.8 mm with respect to SIO. Similarly, we find sub-millimetre mean velocity differences and SD for the N, E and U components of 0.9, 1.5 and 2.2 mm/year with JPL, and of 1.2, 1.6 and 2.3 mm/year with SIO. A noise analysis using maximum likelihood estimation (MLE) shows that when estimating global site velocities from our position time series, the series need to be on average up to 1.3 times longer than those of JPL and SIO, before an uncertainty of less than 0.5 mm/year is obtained.

We develop a Bayesian model (BayesRR-RC) that provides robust SNP-heritability estimation, an alternative to marker discovery, and accurate genomic prediction, taking 22 seconds per iteration to estimate 8.4 million SNP-effects and 78 SNP-heritability parameters in the UK Biobank. We find that only ≤10% of the genetic variation captured for height, body mass index, cardiovascular disease, and type 2 diabetes is attributable to proximal regulatory regions within 10kb upstream of genes, while 12-25% is attributed to coding regions, 32–44% to introns, and 22-28% to distal 10-500kb upstream regions. Up to 24% of all cis and coding regions of each chromosome are associated with each trait, with over 3,100 independent exonic and intronic regions and over 5,400 independent regulatory regions having ≥95% probability of contributing ≥0.001% to the genetic variance of these four traits. Our open-source software (GMRM) provides a scalable alternative to current approaches for biobank data.