Introduction to Geodetic-Grade Braced Monuments for Continuously Operating Reference Stations

May 9, 2024  |  2:00-3:30 pm, ET

Presenter: John Galetzka, CORS Branch Chief, Geodetic Infrastructure Branch, National Geodetic Survey

The crowd-sourced NOAA Continuously Operating Reference Station (CORS) Network, or NCN, provides GNSS data to support precision four-dimensional positioning, meteorology, space weather, and other scientific and engineering applications throughout the United States. A monument is a structure which holds a GNSS antenna and reference point, and connects them to the earth. It’s an essential element of any CORS. For a geodetic CORS, a well designed, situated and maintained monument allows NGS geodesists to better monitor station stability and calculate a high precision position and velocity. It also benefits the scientific and engineering community in ways you may not imagine were possible.  

In the mid-1990s Frank Wyatt and others at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography developed a high precision geodetic monument commonly called the Deep Drilled Braced Monument for 200 new scientific CORSs in the Southern California Integrated GPS Network (SCIGN). The University Navstar Consortium (UNAVCO) readily adopted braced monuments in the early 2000s for the 1200-station Plate Boundary Observatory (PBO) they were tasked by the National Science Foundation to build. In 2015, NGS began to adopt braced monuments for its own backbone network known as Foundation CORS.  

In this webinar John will elaborate on the several varieties of braced monuments, including rough costs, where to deploy, and how to install.