Galen Scott

Bio: Galen Scott works for the Geosciences Research Division within NOAA’s National Geodetic Survey (NGS). He currently serves as the National Height Modernization Program Coordinator and is the Co-Chair of the NOAA Sentinel Site Program. Galen is the founder of the Ecosystems and Climate Operations Team within NGS, which, since 2004, has been helping coastal scientists and managers understand how to obtain accurate elevations and water levels for coastal habitat monitoring and restoration, as well as community vulnerability and resilience assessments. He holds Master’s Degrees in Environmental Science and Policy from Johns Hopkins University and Environmental Science and Management from the University of Rhode Island.

Introduction to the NSRS - Positioning America for the Future

The National Geodetic Survey (NGS), the oldest scientific agency in the federal government, is

responsible for the National Spatial Reference System (NSRS). You may not recognize that name, but you are probably familiar with what is in the NSRS -- latitude, longitude, elevation, gravity, shoreline, and other positioning standards. The NSRS exists so that all federal civilian maps are consistent with one another. But the work of creating and maintaining the NSRS requires a wide array of scientific and technical challenges, from the smallest tasks to the largest. Among them are:

• Computing orbits of GPS satellites accurate to centimeters

• Flying an airborne gravity survey over the entire nation

• Using lidar and photogrammetric surveys to find the location of the official shoreline of the USA

• Writing hundreds of scientific programs to ensure a database holding millions of points positions is accurate

• Tracking star locations in the night sky

• Surveying every airport in the USA

• Performing research on all of the above and more

This talk will provide the background on the NSRS required to understand why NGS is working on new reference frames, how the future frames will be different than the current ones, and how we will all need to work together to bridge the gaps between old and new.

NGS, NSRS, National Spatial Reference System