[G01-P] Poster

[G01-P-11] SIRGAS: the core geodetic infrastructure in Latin America and the Caribbean

Victor Cioce¹, ^○Laura Sanchez², Marco Aurelio de Almeida³, Jose Guillermo Gasca⁴, Hernan Guagni⁵, Alfonso Morillo⁶, Hector Parra⁷, Oscar Rodriguez⁸, Norbertino Suarez⁹, Jose Francisco Valverde¹⁰ (1.Universidad del Zulia, Maracaibo, Venezuela, 2.Technische Universitaet Muenchen, Munich, Germany, 3.Instituto Brasileiro de Geografia e Estatistica, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, 4.Instituto Nacional de Estadistica y Geografia, Aguascalientes, Mexico, 5.Instituto Geografico Nacional,Buenos Aires, Argentina, 6.Instituto Geografico Militar, Quito, Ecuador, 7.Instituto Geografico Militar, Santiago de Chile, Chile, 8.Instituto Geografico Agustin Codazzi, Bogota, Colombia, 9.Servicio Geografico Militar, Montevideo, Uruguay, 10.Universidad Nacional, Heredia, Costa Rica)

Studying, understanding, and modelling geophysical phenomena, such as global change and geodynamics, require geodetic reference frames with (1) an order of accuracy higher than the magnitude of the effects we want to study, (2) consistency and reliability worldwide, and (3) a long-term stability. The definition, realisation and maintenance of the ITRS are oriented to guarantee a globally unified geometric reference frame (i.e., the IRTF) with reliability at the mm-level. The densification of the global ITRF in Latin America and The Caribbean is given by SIRGAS (Sistema de Referencia Geocentrico para Las Americas), primary objective of which is to provide the most precise coordinates in the region. At present, SIRGAS is the backbone for all regional projects based on the generation, use, and analysis of geo-referenced data at national as well as at international level. Besides providing the reference for a wide range of scientific applications such as the monitoring of Earth's crust deformations, vertical movements, sea level variations, atmospheric studies, etc., SIRGAS is also the platform for practical applications such as engineering projects, digital administration of geographical data, geospatial data infrastructures, etc. However, the reliability of SIRGAS as reference frame is being affected by the frequent occurrence of seismic events deforming the geometry of the network and by the omission of non-lineal station movements including systematic errors in epoch coordinates. In this context, this presentation summarises the main challenges faced currently by SIRGAS: (1) A high-resolution monitoring of the reference frame deformation by means of more reference stations and improved analysis standards; (2) Co-seismic deformation models for the transformation of station positions between pre- and post-seismic frame realisations; (3) Reliable modelling of non-lineal station movements in the reference frame computation to improve the estimation of epoch coordinates.