A national network of continuously operating GPS receivers for the UK

Abstract

A national network of continuously operating GPS receivers (COGRs) can provide a temporal and spatial density of continuous GPS data that can greatly expand the potential uses of IGS data. For example, flood defence monitoring on a national scale can be related to the mean sea level monitoring carried out on a global scale. Similarly, the use of data from a national network, supplemented with data from the IGS global network, will permit detailed studies of tropospheric and ionospheric activity. The potential of COGRs has already been recognised by four government organisations in the UK, namely the Environment Agency, the Meteorological Office, the Ministry of Agriculture Fisheries and Food and the Proudmzn Oceanographic Laboratory. By the end of 1998, a national network of 12 COGRs was effectively in place in the UK. In the near future, these 12 COGRs will be supplemented by data from the Ordnance Survey of Great Britain, who have recently announced the establishment of a number of COGRs as active survey reference stations. The IESSG at the University of Nottingham is in the process of establishing a national centre responsible for the transfer, archiving, processing and analysis of data from this network of COGRs in the UK, which will include about 30 stations by the end of 1999. This paper discusses how the national data archive will be structured and presents preliminary results from a number of IESSG research projects that are using the COGR data.