IERS Workshop on Conventions

20-21 September 2007

Scientific Organizing Committee

Background

Over the last three years the IERS Conventions Center has worked on updating the IERS Conventions (2003), since 2005 with the help of an Advisory Board on IERS Conventions Update. This work is reflected in the website http://tai.bipm.org/iers/convupdt/convupdt.html, which keeps track of all updates since the 2003 version.

Nevertheless much remains to be done in order to present a consistent set, in agreement with the current state of knowledge, and to have it actually put into practice by analysis centres. To this end a workshop on the IERS Conventions has been organized at the BIPM on 20-21 September 2007, with the following goals:

• to discuss models recently introduced or considered for introduction in the Conventions, and to present results of tests for these models;
• to define the directions towards a next edition of the IERS in the not-too-distant future;
• to discuss possible longer term issues, either institutional (e.g. scope of the Conventions, links to GGOS Working Group on Conventions, Analysis and Modelling), or technical, such as the definition of tbe regularized positions of stations (which dispacement effects should be modelled and removed in the analysis, and which should not).

The workshop has been organized in conjunction with the Journées 2007 "Systèmes de référence spatio-temporels", held 17-19 September 2007 in Meudon.