This book is a collection of 20 papers presented at three international symposia, dealing predominantly with Antarctic research. The most recent symposium was the ISAES X (X. International Symposium on Antarctic Earth Science), held in August 2007 in Santa Barbara, CA, USA. So the research is current to about the spring of 2007, i.e. up to the beginning of the International Polar Year of 2007/2008. The Antarctic research projects are co-ordinated within the Scientific Committee on Antarctic Research (SCAR) as well as by an expert group on Geodetic Infrastructure of Antarctica (GIANT).
Apart from very interesting geodetic and geophysical research in a very remote region, the papers also cover all aspects of this valuable but expensive effort, including instrument testing and selections, power and communication possibilities and logistics, etc. The users of Antarctic data, unless they have read this book or similar publications on Antarctic/arctic logistics and operations, may not fully appreciate how much effort, both in personal and financial terms, is necessary. Many nations (e.g. Italy, Germany, Australia, Japan, Poland the Russian Federation, Ukraine, United Kingdom, Spain, etc.), have contributed to this valuable effort and are represented in the book by various contributions. Interestingly, the US contributions are limited to only two contributions dealing with GNSS (global navigation satellite system) power and communication requirements, though significant US contributions both in research and operations are acknowledged in many of the papers.
The papers are assembled into three logical groups dealing with instrumentation/operations/communications, geodetic control network infrastructure (contributions to the International GNNS Service (IGS) and the International Terrestrial Reference Frame (ITRF)) and the results of geophysical research (geodynamics, meteorology, gravimetry, sea level studies, glaciology, geomagnetism and seismology). In the first group of papers a reader learns about possible power alternatives (e.g. various solar/wind renewable energy generations) as well as balancing the power requirement, operational environment controls and maximum aircraft loads. Here an uninitiated reader gets the “feel” of the severity and extremeness of Antarctic operations as well as the state of art of operation and power generation logistics, which are applicable for all remote continuous operations.
The second group of papers includes significant Australian and Spanish efforts in establishing geodetic networks in Antarctica. This includes the classical triangulation, levelling and geoid determination. The aim of this geodetic control is to contribute to IGS and ITRF as well as to provide foundations for geodynamic and geophysical research. There is also an interesting Russian paper, which highlights the initial classical triangulation with astronomical controls (much like it was done in Russia, due to its vast and often remote territories), as well as gravimetric surveys of eastern Antarctica with an accuracy of 0.25 mGal and connected to the Moscow reference station!
The third group, geophysical results, contains most of the papers, as it deals with meteorology, gravimetry, glaciology, geomagnetism and geology. The paper on validation of GPS meteorology by the German (University of Dresden) research group is in particularly interesting, since it is (unlike most of the remaining papers) in some aspects more advanced than the current IGS reprocessing effort. More specifically, it is using spatially and temporally varying tropospheric mapping functions (MF), based on numerical weather models, while IGS is using only functional representations of the MF. Especially revealing is the contribution of the Italian Radio-astronomy and Meteorological Agency groups. Not only does it compare GPS and radiosonde derived perceptible water vapour contents, but also includes a nice review of the subject and comparisons of different hydrostatic delay evaluations and the differences seen in Antarctica. Other papers in this group describe in situ GNSS antenna tests and the height solutions dependence on various levels of snow coverage of GNSS antennas; validations of ocean tides by GPS PPP (precise point positioning) through ocean loading as well as by tidal gravimetry. Not all the ocean load computations with recent ocean tide models perform equally well in Antarctica. There are significant differences due to Antarctic coastal delineation used in the ocean loading convolution of Green’s functions as well as the input data coverage included in the current ocean tide models. From the global ocean tide models, even though the region is outside the Topex data coverage, the Topex based models (TPX06.2 and TPX07.0) tend to performed best in Antarctica (as seen by GPS PPP and tidal gravimetry). The geomagnetic paper by the Italian Geophysical Institute is also interesting and educational as it provides a good introduction and review of the subject, including geomagnetic effects on other geophysical processes (e.g. polar motion (Chandler wobble)).
While reading this book one cannot help thinking of the emerging concept of GGOS (the Global Geodetic Observing System) of the International Association of Geodesy, that is to a certain extent, already being realized in Antarctica, albeit only regionally.
The book is well edited and peer reviewed. However, the only (and serious) shortcoming is that it is B/W only, in spite of the fact that nearly all the graphics rely on and assume colour prints. The text and figure legends often refer to different colours of symbols and lines, which in B/W are practically indistinguishable, thus making understanding, reading and interpretation more difficult, and at times nearly impossible. It is a pity that the book is not in colour, or that all the graphics have not been modified for B/W printing. Furthermore, with the rapid development of space techniques, in particular IGS, one cannot help noticing the “age” of most GPS contributions, e.g. that they are still using obsolete ITRF, or only relative antenna phase centre variations and/or an old tropospheric MF despite IGS having mandated all of these improvements and changes by November 2006. Similarly, several papers refer to the International Polar Year of 2007/2008 to solve specific problems, but the IPY contributions are not included in the book. Furthermore, a number of contributions, such as GPS meteorology, ice dynamics, glaciology as well as geodetic controls would benefit from PPP’s, employing IGS orbits and clocks. Such PPP’s would not only improve precision but would also considerably simplify the operations, since there is no need for any base stations (or supporting (continental) networks), and the resulting position and tropospheric delay solutions are already in ITRF2005.
In spite of its shortcoming, the book is very interesting and should be useful to geophysicists and to geodesists specialising in global and regional GNSS analyses.
