I've been aware for several years that this has been in the works but how it will affect my work and legacy SP coordinates that I rely on is not exactly clear to me. Received a rather dumbed down pdf put out by our DNR recently and it frankly raised more questions than provided answers. Wondering if anyone here has some insight into how this is going to play out. Thoughts anyone? The only constant is change.
Just because I'm paranoid, doesn't mean they aren't out to get me.
The way legacy systems are handled will depend entirely on the State. NGS will no longer support them, but most States are preserving them in one way or another.
The biggest impact you will see is when using current positioning tools to locate points?ÿ in legacy systems. You can save a lot of pain by keeping your raw data files with full qc data and transitioning as much as possible to the latest flavor of NAD83 ahead of the switch.
The NGS has put out a series of webinars that will help with the change. We would all do well to dive deep now. If you start in 2022 it's going to be a painful process.
My approach has been do just that, saving all raw data files so that they can be projected in whatever flavor du jour they finally come up with. I'm not looking forward to getting caught with my britches around my ankles on this. I'll check into the webinars and see what useful info I can glean from them. I'd love to take the dive now but it appears nothing has been finalized at this point. Hopefully they'll come up with reliable tools to make the conversions relatively painless with legacy data, but forgive the cynic in me that anticipates a giant cluster flub.
Just because I'm paranoid, doesn't mean they aren't out to get me.
You can download the default designs that have been created so far for Alaska here, if interested.
ftp://www.ngs.noaa.gov/pub/SPCS/DistortionMaps/
If stakeholders in each state can't come to consensus agreement on something other than the NGS "default" designs by the end of this month, the default designs will be implemented.