Every week here at Geo Week News, we have been highlighting some of our favorite stories from around the internet that cover the geospatial, 3D, and AEC industries. Whether it’s a fascinating case study, insights from an industry thought leader, or deep dives into new tools, there is never any shortage of great writing and storytelling in this industry. So, below you can find links to three stories that we loved this week.
Heathrow Airport enhances operational resilience with real-time Esri system
Staff Writer | GEO Informatics
Heathrow Airport has gone live with Heathrow Explorer, an Esri-powered GIS platform that consolidates more than 500,000 assets and nearly 300 data layers into a single real-time operational picture accessible to 3,000 staff across engineering, operations, fire service, retail, and airline partners. The first application out of the gate was a winter resilience tool replacing printed maps with live airside snow clearance tracking on handheld devices, a preview of a broader digital transformation that will eventually extend to the airport’s expansion programme and indoor passenger navigation.
Ocean Specialists Supports Deployment of the University of New Hampshire’s Ocean and Acoustic Observation System
Staff Writer | Geoconnextion
Ocean Specialists has completed the installation of the University of New Hampshire’s Appledore Acoustic Array, a subsea coastal monitoring system off Appledore Island in the Gulf of Maine designed to support environmental research, fisheries science, national security, and long-term ecosystem assessment. The project required cable route surveys, subsea fiber termination design and installation, and full system integration, marking a significant expansion of UNH’s capacity to collect continuous ocean and acoustic data from one of the most rapidly changing bodies of water on the U.S. East Coast.
What RTK actually does inside a SLAM scanner, and why pseudo-fix is the silent killer
Peter Yang | GPS World
Most surveyors assume the RTK module in a handheld SLAM scanner works the way it does in a rover but in a GPS World op-ed, Peter Yang explains that RTK’s actual role is as a global anchor, continuously resetting accumulated drift against an absolute frame rather than positioning the scanner outright. The real danger isn’t losing RTK indoors, which is normal and harmless, but pseudo-fix: a false Fixed status caused by incorrect ambiguity resolution in multipath-heavy environments that hands the SLAM engine a confidently wrong anchor – warping walls, kinking trajectories, and corrupting entire datasets while the log insists everything was fine.
