Thirty Years of Maintaining WGS 84 with GPS

William Konyk, Alex Smith, Bob Wong, and Andrew Tollefson

Peer Reviewed

Abstract:	With the release of a new International Terrestrial Reference Frame (ITRF) in April 2022, the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA) began the process of aligning the World Geodetic System 1984 Terrestrial Reference Frame (WGS 84 TRF) to the latest ITRF realization. The resulting realization, WGS 84 (G2296), represents the seventh such update using Global Positioning System measurements in 30 years. This work outlines the historical development of WGS 84, documents a new technique adopted by NGA in 2021 to maintain alignment between WGS 84 and the latest ITRF, provides transformation parameters between recent WGS 84 TRF realizations, and assesses the accuracy of WGS 84 TRF relative to the ITRF. We demonstrate that for high-accuracy users, the two frames have empirically remained within 3 cm of each other over the past decade.
Published in:	NAVIGATION: Journal of the Institute of Navigation, Volume 72, Number 2
Cite this article:	Citation Tools are available on the NAVIGATION open access site https://doi.org/10.33012/navi.693
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