Geodesy for Geomatics and GIS Professionals

Geodesy for Geomatics and GIS Professionals is a college level textbook that provides an introduction to the subject of coordinate systems and datums. Designed as a textbook for a course for surveyors and GIS professionals the book centers on the three dimensionality that is essential in the modern day with the advent of GPS. The book does assume a familiarity and understanding of geometry and trigonometry, and some parts, although not a majority of the text, requires basic knowledge of elementary calculus and matrix manipulation. One reviewer noted that a highly valuable aspect of this book is that relevant formulas are illustrated by giving numeric solutions to example problems.

The authors note that the study of Geodesy has always been an important to land survey, Geomatics and GIS Professionals because the assumptions that allow the use of a tangent plane as a reference surface for surveying, and the use of plane trigonometry for the mathematical calculations, break down and generate unacceptable errors in surveys of large areal extent. This is due to the physical nature of the earth's gravity field, the curvature of the earth, and the fact that meridians converge to the geographic poles. Today the study of Geodesy, Statistics, and Least Squares Adjustments are even more important in order to understand the use of GPS for precise positioning.