Scientific Committee on Antarctic Research

• Home
• Search:
• Members only

• About
• Science
  & Data
• News
• Events
• Antarctic
  Treaty
• Antarctic
  Information
• International
  Polar Year
• Publications
• Communication
  and Education
• Contacts

You are in:  Home » Publications » Reports » Report 21

SCAR Report No 21, January 2002

The SCAR GPS Campaigns in the ITRF2000

R. Dietrich, A. Rülke
Institut für Planetare Geodäsie, Technische Universität Dresden, Germany

The realization of the International Terrestrial Reference Frame (ITRF) is an important goal of the international geodetic community. Observations of satellites of the Global Positioning System (GPS) are thereby a major contribution. Data acquired during the SCAR GPS Campaigns represent valuable input for this pupose, which has been described in detail (Dietrich, 2001). It has been demonstrated, that also for Antarctica accuracies in the 1cm-level have been achieved, and the results include the tectonic motions of Antarctic GPS sites (Dietrich et al., 2001).

Regional densifications were accepted for the realization of the ITRF2000 for the first time. As a regional densification solution for Antarctica all GPS data from 1995 to 1999 have been reprocessed with the Bernese GPS Software, Version 4.2 and forwarded as a SINEX file to the ITRS Centre of the IERS, Paris.

As a result, all Antarctic GPS stations, which provided data, are now included in the official ITRF2000 solution, which is available in the Internet (Altamimi, 2001). Table 1 shows the ITRF2000 coordinates and rates. The station distribution and horizontal motion rates are displayed in figure 1. Thanks are directed to all participants of the SCAR GPS Campaigns.

Figure 1. Station distribution and horizontal motion rates of Antarctic GPS stations within ITRF2000

Table 1: Co-ordinate solutionof ITRF2000, epoch 1997.0 and velocity solution for Antarctic sites (from(Altamimi, 2001)).

We strongly recommend that all users of GPS in Antarctica refer to the official ITRF2000 coordinates.

References

Altamimi (2001). http://lareg.ensg.ign.fr/ITRF/ITRF2000.

Dietrich, R. (2001). Present Status of the SCAR GPS Epoch Campaigns. In SCAR Report No. 20, pages 15&emdash;18,Cambridge, UK.

Dietrich, R., Dach, R., Engelhardt, G., Ihde, J., Korth, W., Kutterer, H.-J., Lindner, K., Mayer, M., Menge, F., Miller, H., Müller, C., Niemeier, W., Perlt, J., Pohl, M., Salbach, H., Schenke, H.-W., Schöne, T., Seeber, G., Veit, A., and Völksen, C. (2001). ITRF coordinates and plate velocities from repeated GPS campaigns in Antarctica–an analysis based on different individual solutions. Journal of Geodesy, 74:756–766.