Completed
Topics
The geodetic infrastructure and its products, notably the terrestrial reference frame, provides the information needed to pinpoint the locations of satellite, aircraft, and ground-based instruments and the geophysical phenomena they are tracking. Thus, the geodetic infrastructure is essential for supporting scientific inquiries that require precise measurements of location and time, such as sea-level rise, ice-sheet change, and earthquake deformation. This study is aimed at helping discipline scientists understand how their research connects with the underlying terrestrial reference frame and helping NASA and other federal agencies understand how the terrestrial reference frame needs to evolve to answer priority science questions.
Featured publication
Consensus
·2020
Satellite remote sensing is the primary tool for measuring global changes in the land, ocean, biosphere, and atmosphere. Over the past three decades, active remote sensing technologies have enabled increasingly precise measurements of Earth processes, allowing new science questions to be asked and a...
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Description
An ad hoc panel of the Committee on Seismology and Geodynamics (COSG) will carry out a study organized around a workshop to identify key connections between geodesy and priority Earth science questions, and explore how to improve the geodetic infrastructure to meet new science needs. In particular, the panel will undertake the following tasks:
1. Summarize progress in maintaining and improving the geodetic infrastructure, as detailed in the recommendations in Precise Geodetic Infrastructure: National Requirements for a Shared Resource (NRC, 2010), and aspirations for future improvements through, for example, new technology and analysis.
2. Identify science questions from the 2017 Decadal Survey on Earth Science and Applications from Space (NASEM, expected late 2017) that depend on geodesy, and describe the connections between these questions, associated measurement requirements, and geodetic data.
3. Discuss the elements of these science questions that drive future requirements for the terrestrial reference frame, Earth-orientation parameters, and satellite orbits, and identify what geodetic infrastructure changes are needed to help answer the questions.
4. Identify priority improvements to the geodetic infrastructure that would facilitate advances across the science questions identified in Task 2.
Collaborators
Sponsors
NASA
Staff
Anne Linn
Lead
Eric Edkin
