The interdisciplinary role of space geodesy—Revisited

In 1988 the interdisciplinary role of space geodesy has been discussed by a prominent group of leaders in the fields of geodesy and geophysics at an international workshop in Erice (Mueller and Zerbini, 1989). The workshop may be viewed as the starting point of a new era of geodesy as a discipline of Earth sciences. Since then enormous progress has been made in geodesy in terms of satellite and sensor systems, observation techniques, data processing, modelling and interpretation. The establishment of a Global Geodetic Observing System (GGOS) which is currently underway is a milestone in this respect. Wegener served as an important role model for the definition of GGOS. In turn, Wegener will benefit from becoming a regional entity of GGOS. What are the great challenges of the realisation of a 10 −9 global integrated observing system? Geodesy is potentially able to provide – in the narrow sense of the words – “metric and weight” to global studies of geo-processes. It certainly can meet this expectation if a number of fundamental challenges, related to issues such as the international embedding of GGOS, the realisation of further satellite missions and some open scientific questions can be solved. Geodesy is measurement driven. This is an important asset when trying to study the Earth as a system. However its guideline must be: “What are the right and most important observables to deal with the open scientific questions?”.