From Geoscience Australia
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Smoothing Out the Wrinkles in Australia's Aging Vertical Datum

Created 16/10/2025

Updated 16/10/2025

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• Vertical datums are a foundational piece of the positioning puzzle that allows us make sense of height measurements - they make it possible to align height data by defining where all heights are zero. But when the vertical datum is unreliable, we lose perspective on which direction is down and this can cause strange things to happen. Water can appear to flow in the wrong direction or pool in unexpected places. • The Australian Height Datum (AHD) is the current, official, vertical datum in use in Australia. At 50 years old this year, it has stood the test of time well. But, it has a number of bumps and wrinkles (errors and distortions), relies on degrading physical infrastructure and was never intended to be used with modern positioning technology like GPS. The Australian Vertical Working Surface is a shiny new alternative vertical datum that doesn’t depend on any physical infrastructure, is free from the errors in the AHD and is designed to be directly compatible with GPS technology in the first instance.

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Additional Info

Field Value
Title Smoothing Out the Wrinkles in Australia's Aging Vertical Datum
Language eng
Licence Not Specified
Landing Page https://data.gov.au/data/dataset/ac6a9d01-aac2-4f93-81ef-59d775ad5535
Contact Point
Geoscience Australia Data
clientservices@ga.gov.au
Reference Period 08/04/2019
Geospatial Coverage
Map data © OpenStreetMap contributors
{
  "coordinates": [
    [
      [
        112.0,
        -44.0
      ],
      [
        154.0,
        -44.0
      ],
      [
        154.0,
        -9.0
      ],
      [
        112.0,
        -9.0
      ],
      [
        112.0,
        -44.0
      ]
    ]
  ],
  "type": "Polygon"
}
Data Portal Geoscience Australia

Data Source

This dataset was originally found on Geoscience Australia "Smoothing Out the Wrinkles in Australia's Aging Vertical Datum". Please visit the source to access the original metadata of the dataset:
https://ecat.ga.gov.au/geonetwork/srv/eng/csw/dataset/smoothing-out-the-wrinkles-in-australias-aging-vertical-datum