GPS & Land Surveying

One of the most important ways global positioning systems have improved government capabilities is through the impact it has had on land surveying. Land surveying has been around for centuries, including in ancient Egypt where a rope and geometry calculations were used to determine an accurate position of the surveyor and the terrestrial points such as mountains, valleys and hills that were near the survey location.The government has always seen the importance of land surveying and Federal Government surveyors, known as cadastral land surveyors, have been making maps for a number of years. They are able to create topographical maps, land surface maps, water & other natural resource maps as well as fault line maps for the government. With the invent of GPS, land surveying has become a much more simple task with more accurate results.The global positioning system, which is stationed on a tripod, is able to find points using the satellites that send the information the the surveyor's computer, where the data can determine the position of the points to the closest millimeter. Here is a video of a land surveyor in action in Santa Clara county!