Houston, Texas, is one of the earliest urban areas to employ Global Positioning System (GPS) technology for land subsidence and fault monitoring. As of 2020, the University of Houston and the Harris-Galveston Subsidence District have integrated over 230 permanent GPS stations into their routine GPS data processing for regional subsidence and fault monitoring. This article summarizes the GPS geodetic infrastructure in the Greater Houston region.

This art presents ten years of urban subsidence derived from continuous GPS stations operated by the Crustal Movement Observational Network of China within and adjacent to the municipality of Tianjin. The subsidence time series presented in this study provide reliable “ground truth” and constraints for calibrating or validating subsidence estimations from numerical modeling and repeated surveys using other remote sensing techniques.

The study establishes the first local reference frame for the Gulf of Mexico region using the observations from 13 GNSS sites. The root mean square (RMS) of the velocities of the 13 reference stations achieves 0.2 mm yr⁻¹ in the horizontal and 0.3 mm yr⁻¹ in the vertical directions. Land subsidence, faulting, and salt dome activities in the Houston region, Mexico City, and the southeastern Louisiana region are discussed and compared.