Geodesy Section News

 

As has been the case in the previous years, the Geodesy Section of the Canadian Geophysical Union had a series of important activities during the Canadian Geophysical Union Annual Meeting 2006, held in Banff, in May: Meeting of the Executive, Annual General Meeting, hosting of meeting sessions, Student Paper Competition and the Tenth Geoid Workshop.

 

Three Geodesy-related sessions took place during the CGU Annual Meeting: Geodesy and Geodynamics, with 14 papers, Geocomputations & Visualization, and Geophysical Studies, with 11 papers, and Cryosphere and the International Polar Year, with 11 papers. This resulted in a total of 36 papers related to Geodesy.  Dr. John Wahr, from UCAR, was a guest speaker talking about the GRACE satellite mission.

 

There were six student papers competing for the $500 prize awarded by the Geodesy Section sponsored by the Geodetic Survey Division of NRCan. The winner was Mr. by Mahmoud Abd El-Gelil, a graduate student from the Department of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences, York University. The competing papers were:

 

o       A Consistent Canadian Gravity Anomaly Database, by Ibraheem Ali

o       On the Interpolation of Velocity Surfaces Using Radial Base Functions, by Elena Rangelova

o       Levelling network analysis for the definition of a kinematic vertical datum in Canada, by B. Devaraju

o       Time Variable Gravity due to Seasonal Volume Changes in the Great Lakes, by W. van der Wal

o       Application of DInSAR-GPS optimization for derivation of three dimensional surface motion maps of southern California, by Sergey Samsonov

o       Atmospheric Density Admittance Function for Gravity Reduction, by Mahmoud Abd El-Gelil, Spiros Pagiatakis

o       Kernel Singularity Impact on the Wavelet Evaluation of Geodetic Integrals, by M. M. El-Habiby

 

Other geodetic paper was recognized during the CGU Annual Meeting. Mr. W. van der Wal (see above) won the CGU best student paper award.

 

A new Geodesy Section Executive was elected:

·        Marcelo Santos                  President                      (UNB)

·        Joe Henton             Vice-President              (NRCan)

·        Georgia Fotopoulus            Secretary                      (UofT)

·        Rod Blais                           Treasurer                      (UofC)

·        Patrick Wu             Member-at-large          (UofC)

·        Alex Braun             Member-at-large          (UofC)

·        Spiros Pagiatakis                Past-President              (York)

 

 

 

The Tenth Geoid Workshop that took place on 17 May 2005. This year, the main topics of the Workshop were the adoption of the Canadian Gravimetry Geoid 2005 as the new vertical reference for Canada, the proposals related to the International Polar Year, and on the geodesy-related projects funded by the NCE GEOIDE Network.