The IVS Combination Centre was inaugurated by the International VLBI Service for Geodesy and Astrometry (IVS) Directing Board in October 2008 as a joint effort of the Federal Agency for Cartography and Geodesy (BKG) and the German Geodetic Research Institute (DGFI-TUM).
The tasks of this IVS Combination Centre include quality control and a timely combination of the session-based intermediate results of the IVS Analysis Centres into a final combination product (e.g., Earth Orientation Parameters, EOP).
These combination results will be released as official IVS products. Furthermore, the IVS Combination Centre is also expected to contribute to the generation of the official IVS input to any ITRF activities.
Assigned Tasks at BKG
Check the format of the results and their suitability for combination, perform identification and reduction of outliers, compare the Analysis Centres' results against each other and compare the results w.r.t. external time series, e.g. from IERS or IGS.
Quality control results will be available at this IVS Combination Centre Web page.
Combination products will be created using the DGFI DOGS software package, which operates by the combination of unconstrained (free) normal equations.
The produced official IVS combination products will be submitted to the responsible IERS components as requested by the IERS.
Final results will be placed in the BKG Data Center.
Official IVS input to the ITRF will be created as combined weekly solutions in SINEX format
Analysis Centers
Analysis Centres produce series of Earth Orientation Parameters (EOP) as well as station coordinates and source positions in regular intervals. These individual series are combined
by the IVS Combination Centre at BKG and sumbitted as official IVS products.