Dear Markus,

Thank you for sending the draft agenda of the IERS Combination
WG Meeting in Vienna.

As you already know, one of the main agenda items of the IERS
Directing Board meeting in Vienna is devoted to the status
and strategy of the ITRF2004, as an official IERS product,
which will be largely discussed.

As representative of the ITRS PC at the IERS DB, I will present
a full status report on ITRF2004 at the IERS DB meeting which will
take place the day after the planed WG meeting. I will also outline
the main ITRF2004 issues in my EGU presentation in session G1 on
Friday.

Therefore, I suggest to reduce the time allocated to the ITRF2004
discussion during the WG meeting and to focus more on the objectives
of the CPP (see below). In particular, Item 3 of your agenda becomes
unnecessary and suggest to drop it. Martine presentation could be
added to item 4.

Concerning the CPP, I fully agree with Jim and Pascal that the CPP
objectives should be completely re-defined and in particular
redirected in the two ways Jim and I outlined at Nice meeting. And
discuss additional points that Jim addressed in his e-mail (Mon,
14 Mar 2005), e.g. combination of the biased satellite-based LOD
with VLBI-derived UT1/LOD, taking benefit of the ITRF2004.
I also completely follow Pascal that discussing future IERS products
is more than premature. Therefore I suggest to devote the 2 hrs
WG meeting in Vienna to discuss the future of the CPP and its
objectives.

Our group at IGN will not consider contributing to the CPP, before
(1) defining/adopting its future objectives and (2) the release of
the ITRF2004, as a long-term multi-technique reference solution
necessary for any CPP developments, as I mentioned several times
in earlier exchanges within this group.

Best regards
Zuheir


Markus Rothacher wrote :

> Dear Colleagues,
> 
> please find attached the draft agenda of the
> IERS Combination WG Meeting. If you have a short
> presentation relevant for one of the topics,
> please let me know, so that it can be included in the agenda.
> The focus should be, however, on topic 5, the
> "Next Steps and Future IERS Products", where we should
> allow much time for a thorough discussion of the next steps,
> the strategies and goals (including ITRF2004 and IERS CPP),
> based mainly on the draft document "Steps Toward Future IERS
> Products" that I will send out Tuesday or Wednesday this
> week as a priori information.
> 
> I would also like to mention that a third DORIS long time series
> has been submitted by LEGOS-CLS (LCA). It will be available
> in the IERS database soon.
> At present, we are still missing the IVS combined solution.
> 
> Hope to see you all in Vienna.
> With best regards,
>                          Markus Rothacher

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Zuheir Altamimi                           Email : altamimi@ensg.ign.fr
Institut Geographique National            Phone : 33 1 64 15 32 55
ENSG/LAREG                                FAX   : 33 1 64 15 32 53
6-8 Avenue Blaise Pascal
77455 Champs-sur-Marne, FRANCE
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