GGOS bureau of products and standards inventory of standards and conventions for geodesy

Abstract

The Bureau of Products and Standards (BPS), the former Bureau for Standards and Conventions supports IAG’s Global Geodetic Observing System (GGOS) in its goals to integrate the three pillars of geodesy: geometry, rotation and gravity field of the Earth and to obtain geodetic products of highest accuracy and consistency. The key objective of the BPS is to ensure the adoption and implementation of common standards and conventions by all IAG components as a fundamental prerequisite for a consistent processing of the different geometric and gravimetric observations. This paper provides the charter of the BPS and gives an overview about the present activities. A major focus of the work is on the compilation of an inventory based on the evaluation of the standards and conventions currently in use by the IAG Services and their contributing analysis centres for the data processing and for the generation of geometric and gravimetric products, such as geodetic reference frames, Earth orientation parameters, gravity field models and satellite orbits. The paper presents some results of this evaluation regarding numerical standards, including time and tide systems and it addresses various aspects related to the geopotential value W0 and to the datum definition of the International Terrestrial Reference System (ITRS).