CE 306 - Analysis of Survey Observations

Catalog Description

Evaluation of instruments and measurement systems; instrumental checks and adjustments; methods of observing, recording, abstracting, and evaluating angular and leveling measurements; electromagnetic distance measurement systems, with emphasis on infrared light, laser, and microwave instrumentation; astronomical observations for directional control and position; and global positioning system.

Course Objective

This course emphasizes proper usage, adjustment, and calibration of surveying instruments. Students learn data reduction methods. Students are introduced to geodetic survey observations and astronomic coordinate systems. Emphasis is placed on survey standards and specifications and how to design and execute the field survey to meet them.
Credits 3 (2 hr Lec/3 hr Lab)
Prereq: CE200 or equiv.

 

Useful Links

 

Units and Computations
See the NIST site for reference information on units and a discussion of unit conversion, significant figures, and rounding.

Statistics
Many interesting online calculators can be found at Martindale's 'The Reference Desk'. Among the calculators is WebStat, a very useful calculator application for basic sample statistics and tests.

Data
The National Geodetic Survey (NGS) provides on-line interactive computation of geodetic values at the NGS Geodetic Tool Kit. These same routines are used in the Corpscon package by the Army Corps of Engineers that transforms coordinate values between datums and coordinate frames.
NGS Products and Services include control station data sheets.
USGS Topographic Map Symbols are shown and documentation is available to help you interpret topographic quad maps. A companion booklet on Topographic Mapping is also interesting, although this version is dated and is mostly for historical background on the USGS mapping process.
The US Census Bureau provides timely, relevant, and quality data about the people and economy of the United States. The site includes a gazetteer that is used to identify and list geographic position of places to view with the Tiger Map Server and obtain census data from the 1990 Census Lookup server. You can search for places, counties or MCDs by entering the name and state abbreviation (optional), or 5-digit zip code.
The National Geophysical Data Center maintains extensive archives of geomagnetic data to further the understanding of Earth magnetism.

Geodesy and GPS
There is an animated tutorial at the Trimble company site.

Astronomy
Ephemeris Table for Sun and Polaris maintained by Jerry Wahl of BLM.
NIST Time and Frequency Division where you can check the time and obtain software to set your computer clock. Reference material for time and WWWV radio signals is also included.
Print out the sky charts at Heavens-Above. You will need to enter your latitude and longitude. Many other interesting references are included for satellite and astronomy observations.
A useful celestial coordinates tutorial is available at the Sommers-Bausch Observatory's web page. It is part of the astronomy online page at the University of Colorado.
What is time? Check out the article on clocks and calendars at britannica.com.
Have some fun at Paul Carlisle's Earth Viewer page. Animate the globe and experiment with latitude, longitude, time, and date. The animation is very useful for illustrating equinoxes and solstices.

 

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Download CCSURV shareware

Save the CCSURV shareware file (approx. 343KB) to your local diskette (A:\). The file is a self extracting ZIP file. Click the download command below and use the save prompt to specifiy a drive and filename for saving (a:\ccshare.zip). Copy the file to a directory on your home PC's hard disk. Enter ccshare.zip to extract the software.

Click here to download CCSURV Shareware

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Last Updated by Steven D. Johnson on Sunday, 13 September, 1998 at 3:55 PM.