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Itegration of continental drift for reference Systems ITRF2000 and ETRF89

  • July 31, 2016
  • 2 replies
  • 19 views
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Due to the annual drift of the continents, there is a growing shift between coordinate systems with the reference Systems ITRF2000 and ETRF89. The annual shift is about 2,5 cm each year which results in a gap to WGS84 in FME, as this coordinate system seems to have a reference to the epoche of 1989. This gap is now about 75 centimeters. Comlexe formulas will have to be implemented to solve this problem, an idividual grid-shift file will not result in the desired accuracy. The integration of this annual shift for every year is important for many clients, especially airports.

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2 replies

K
  • kaihaase
  • April 10, 2017

This problem will influence all European airports and organizations which work with international flight information. The ETRS/ETRF 89 is roughly the solution from WGS84 fixed on the European Continent in 1989. Due the continental drift, the gap between WGS84 and ETRS89 will grow every year approximately for 2.5 cm. So we will reach in the next years a significant gap between this booth systems. Actually all the transformer in FME says, ETRS/ETRF 89 is the same like WGS84. This isn’t correct, but for a lot of uses still acceptable. For satellite based air navigation not.

 

WGS84 is an Earth fixed reference system and all Coordinates in this system are dynamic. So we need a transformer where the resulted WGS84 Coordinates are dependent from time. For example, a coordinate from one and the same Point in Europe should have in WGS 84 have 1997 and 2017, two different coordinates with a distance from roughly 50 cm.

S

The common understanding of coordinates gathered by gps in Europe is 'We have WGS84 coordinates', that's wrong, the continental drift is ignored.

Therefor it's necessary to know the gap generated by the continental drift.

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