With 2021 coming to an end, we wanted to wrap up the year with a blog post summarizing all the things that happened within the Geodesy division. And, although we are still in the middle of a pandemic, there are a number of things to look forward to in 2022!
Looking back on 2021
New Division Team
2021 was a year with many changes in the Geodesy Division. Outgoing Division President Johannes Böhm handed over to Annette Eicker (who was the Deputy President for the last two years), and Roelof Rietbroek has become the new Deputy President. Annette Eicker has since been reelected in the Election Autumn 2021 to serve another term as Division President (2023-2025). We also have two new Science Officers: Anna Kłos and Xavier Collilieux who replaced Adrian Jäggi. The ECS (Early Career Scientists) representatives also changed from Katrin Bentel and Mathis Bloßfeld who handed over to Rebekka Steffen and Andreas Kvas. The ECS Team has also grown, with Öykü Koç, Laura Jensen, and Bart Root providing regular input to the division blog and the Campfire events. We want to thank all the current and earlier team members for the work they put into the EGU and the Geodesy Division.
You can find out more about the new division team in our introductory blog series.
G Division Campfires
In 2021 we have started a new platform for informal scientific exchange and networking: the Geodesy Division Campfires! Under the motto “Share your research” we invite scientists,especially ECS, in Geodesy and related fields to present their research in a more casual setting. So far, we had three Campfire events with seven talks covering a wide range of topics from different geodetic disciplines. But not only this, we enjoyed talking with each other in smaller groups giving all participants to have a networking platform. In total, over 100 attendees joined in and participated in the Campfires, which led to great interactions and discussions.
Group Photos After the G Division Campfires
Topics covered this year were quantum gravity measurements (Öykü Koç: Static and time-variable gravity field determination by quantum measurements: MOCAST+ study), history of Geodesy (Bart Root: Around the World with Professor Vening Meinesz – On the First Gravity Measurements in the Oceans), GNSS processing (Sebastian Strasser: The many challenges of reprocessing 27 years of GNSS products; Susanne Glaser: Simulation and combination of space geodetic techniques in view of the Global Geodetic Observing System; Giulio Tagliaferro: Hermite Normal Form and a General Approach to Rank Deficient Integer Estimation: With Applications to GNSS Adjustment), Geodesy and Climate Research (Laura Jensen: Satellite gravimetry for climate model evaluation) and modelling of the atmosphere (Kyriakos Balidakis: Weather Contribution to Tides). You can find the abstract of each talk on the G Division blog. We want to thank all speakers and participants, who have made these events a very enjoyable experience.
The G Division Blog
Activity on the G Division Blog picked up in 2021, with 18 blog posts, an average of 60 visitors per week and over 90 weekly views. Next to the introduction of the new division team and the Campfire teasers, we started a new series on our blog: Geodesists on Tour. The aim of this series is to put a focus on fieldwork in Geodesy. While many think that Geodesists are sitting at a computer and calculating something, fieldwork is for a lot of us a large part of our daily job. And the data that Geodesists are collecting are not only used by Geodesists again, almost all other geoscientific disciplines rely on geodetic data. To showcase this, we have invited various researchers to talk about their experiences. So far, we have had Jyri Näränen talking about measuring gravity changes and Stephanie Konfal telling us what it means to install GPS stations, both in Antarctica. Next year, we will head to other parts on Earth and learn more about geodetic fieldwork. Have a special look at Stephanie’s blog post and if you like it, then please give it your vote at the EGU’s Blog of the Year competition 2021 until January 20th.
But not only this, we have had the pleasure to read more about the person Vening Meinesz (the biggest EGU Geodesy award is named after him) and learn what it means to start a PhD during the pandemic. Our ECS Representative Rebekka Steffen was also interviewed by EGU about her role as ECS Representative of the Geodesy Division. A big thank you to all authors, editors, readers, and sharers
The EGU General Assembly 2021
EGU General Assembly 2021 G Division Abstract Word Cloud
The General Assembly (GA) 2021 “vEGU21: Gather Online” was held as an online-only conference due to the ongoing pandemic. This year’s GA spanned two weeks, with the first week dedicated to short courses, great debates, and networking events and the second week focused on scientific exchange. Next to the Division meeting, we hosted an ECS event and a pop-up networking event on Zoom. The Geodesy Reception typically held at TUtheSky in Vienna was converted to an online meeting on Gather. In total, the GA 2021 featured 26 Geodesy related scientific sessions with 385 abstracts. Even though the online setting made interacting harder, meetups on Gather and Zoom during the conference and the virtual closing party made the conference a great experience. During the GA, we were treated to two Vening Meinesz Medal Lectures, with both the 2020 medallist Willi Freeden and the 2021 medallist Christopher Jekeli holding their lectures “Decorrelative Mollifier Gravimetry” and “The Deflection of the Vertical, from Bouguer to Vening-Meinesz, and Beyond – the unsung hero of geodesy and geophysics” during this year’s GA. Similarly, we had two Outstanding ECS Award Lectures, with the 2020 award winner Karina Wilgan presenting “Tropospheric products as a signal of interest – overview of troposphere sensing techniques “, and the 2021 award winner Anna Kłos presenting “Benchmarking GPS stations: an improved way to identify the GPS sensitivity “. This year’s Virtual Outstanding Student and PhD candidate Presentation (vOSPP) Award was awarded to Sebastian Strasser for his vPICO “Comparison and generalization of GNSS satellite attitude models”.
Looking forward to 2022!
Award Winners
We want to congratulate the winner of the 2022 Vening Meinesz Medal Peter J. G. Teunissen and the 2022 Geodesy Division Outstanding ECS Kristel Chanard. Let’s hope for an in-person celebration in Vienna next year!
General Assembly 2022
The GA 2022 is planned as a hybrid meeting with an on-site part in Vienna and an online part. You can find up-to-date information on https://www.egu22.eu/ or Twitter: @EGU_Geodesy, @EuroGeosciences. Note: The abstract deadline is just around the corner (12 Jan 2022, 13:00 CET)!
The GA features a wide spectrum of geodesy sessions with a strong interdisciplinary character. Next to core geodetic topics like reference frames, the measurement of the time-variable shape, gravity field, and rotation of the Earth, and highly-precise positioning on the Earth and in space, the GA features applications of geodetic science in climate, hydrological, cryospheric, oceanographic and solid earth sciences. In addition to all the science, the Geodesy division team also plans to host a networking event for all division members.
Furthermore, at the GA 2022 we will also host a Geodesy 101 short course, which will give an introduction into the computation of some widely used geodetic datasets and what is necessary to consider when using such data. The short course is open for everyone to join (ECS and non-ECS, Geodesists and non-Geodesists).
Geodesy Division Campfires in 2022
We are very much looking forward to continuing the “Share your research” series of online networking events in 2022. If you want to present your research at one of the future Geodesy Campfires, contact us at ecs-g@egu.eu.
Blog and Outreach
We want to continue to publish geodesy related stories of PhD life, research aspects that are less visible in traditional science publications and interesting stories of how we ended up at the current state of the art. If you want to contribute to the blog or the general outreach of G division, email us at ecs-g@egu.eu.
Get in Touch
We very much welcome feedback, suggestions for events and things that should be brought to attention. If you want to contribute to the blog, the Campfires, or the general outreach of the Geodesy division, contact us at ecs-g@egu.eu.
We wish you a peaceful end of the year and a good start into 2022. Stay safe!
The Geodesy Division Team
