Department 1: Geodesy and Remote Sensing

Director: Prof. Dr. Harald Schuh

The focus of our work is to measure in detail the shape and rotation of the Earth, its orientation in space, its surface, and its gravitational field. For that purpose we analyse and interpret data from various national and international satellite missions for remote sensing of the Earth from space like, e.g., the GRACE (Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment) satellites, and develop new systems, like the future missions EnMAP (Environmental Mapping and Analysis Program) or GRACE-FO (GRACE Follow-on).

We are proposing new Earth science applications for the signals of the American GPS, the Russian GLONASS, and the Chinese Compass/Beidou satellites. We are also contributing to the development of the European satellite navigation system Galileo, which will be incorporated into our research (these four systems are summarized as GNSS, Global Navigation Satellite Systems). Measurements from airplanes and ground-based geodetic observations, as well as the development and application of corresponding analysis techniques, round out the spectrum of our tasks. Finally, we utilize all these measurements and observations in computer models in order to simulate and understand the dynamic processes in the Earth’s interior, on its surface, in the oceans, in the atmosphere and cryosphere.
 

The research of Department 1 is organised in five sections:
 

• Section 1.1 GPS/Galileo Earth Observation
• Section 1.2 Global Geomonitoring and Gravity Field
• Section 1.3 Earth System Modelling
• Section 1.4 Remote Sensing
• Section 1.5 Geoinformatics