Some revolutions happen in silence. That certainly holds true for one of the most recent revolutions in geomatics: the development of a new geoid by the Gravity field and steady-state Ocean Circulation Explorer (GOCE) team. In 2009 a preliminary geoid was unveiled, and the team is still developing it further today, adding more data and hence improving its accuracy. One of the initiators of this European Union satellite mission and head of the team researching the data, professor Reiner Rummel from the Technical University Munich, explains in this issue of GIM International that GOCE has been measuring the gravity field from space for the very first time (see page 14). The geoid derived from GOCE data will end up in a single system uniting many countries' height systems. Surveyors all over the globe will be basing their surveys on one height system, and large-scale levelling will very soon be history.
展开▼
