National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration July 24, 2020 – Federal Register Recent Federal Regulation Documents

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), Office for Coastal Management will hold a public meeting to solicit comments on the performance evaluation of the Lake Superior National Estuarine Research Reserve.

The National Geodetic Survey (NGS) is in the process of modernizing the National Spatial Reference System (NSRS) and plans to replace all three North American Datum of 1983 (NAD 83) frames and all vertical datums, including the North American Vertical Datum of 1988 (NAVD 88), with four new terrestrial reference frames and one new geopotential datum to which all geodetic coordinates and derived coordinates within the NSRS will be referenced. The new reference frames will rely primarily on Global Navigation Satellite Systems (GNSS), such as the Global Positioning System (GPS), as well as on a gravimetric geoid model resulting from the Gravity for the Redefinition of the American Vertical Datum (GRAV-D) Project. The modernized NSRS will be easier to access and maintain than the existing NSRS, which relies on physical survey marks that deteriorate over time and will result in new, more accurate, time-tagged geodetic coordinates (i.e., latitude, longitude, ellipsoid height, orthometric height, acceleration of gravity, deflections of the vertical, and others) at all geodetic control points within the NSRS. Additionally, coordinates will be estimated within these frames and datum at five-year reference epochs from the time-tagged coordinates, beginning with 2020.00. Initial completion and rollout of the NSRS modernization is expected to occur between 2022 and 2025, with additional support tools and services rolled out in subsequent years.