Preparing for Change: New Coordinates Coming in 2022 #bestpractices #collaboration #geodesy #metadata
22 May 19
9:00 AM
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9:30 AM
Since the creation of the first GNSS (Global Navigation Satellite System), improvements in technology have driven advancements in high precision geodetics. Coordinate systems, the means by which we record positional information, need to evolve with the times. As a part of the current ten-year plan of the National Geodetic Survey, new referencing systems are being developed to more accurately model the North American continent and to handle the dynamic nature of the very tectonic plates our coordinate systems attempt to model. A number of new naming schemes and guidelines have already been published by the NGS and we are just over three years away from the arrival of these new standards. Anyone who has worked in the geospatial industry long enough to remember the shift from NAD27 to NAD83, will recall that it was a complex process to migrate existing data over to the new datums and State Plane Coordinate Systems. The 2022 update promises to be just as seismic a shift. We will see new geometric reference frames (datums), new vertical references, and both will be subject to dynamic motion through time; the systems will move! Also being developed are new State Plane Coordinate Systems; the very “X’s and Y’s” that give us our maps shape. In this presentation, we will introduce the basic frameworks of the new coordinate systems and explore the differences from the way our current coordinate systems work. More importantly for most data managers, we will explore the practical implications of this transition and the short and long-term consequences for the oil and gas industry. Finally, for interested stakeholders, we will offer some recommendations on how to get involved to ensure we are all ready when the change occurs and to mitigate any issues that might arise in regard to the geodetic integrity of critical datasets.