Height of Peak Bolivar, Venezuela

On 01 February 2002, within a join project carried out by the Simon Bolivar University (USB) GPS Geodesy Lab, the School of Geodesy of The University of Zulia (LUZ) and the National Institute of Geography (IGVSB), we performed a series of GPS observations on top of Peak Bolívar, the highest Venezuelan mountain, icon of the country’s geography, and on seven other summits along the Venezuelan Andes, to determine their orthometric height.

For the first time in the scientific world of Geodesy, an orthometric height was calculated by combining GPS observations with a regional geoid model, derived at LUZ for the Venezuelan region with precisions of a few decimeters, rather that using the NASA global models that normally yield errors in the order of meters or decameters. The newly calculated height of Peak Bolívar, 4978.4 ± 0.4 m, adopted by the IGVSB as the new official altitude of the peak, is 23.6 m smaller than the height obtained by combining trigonometric triangulation techniques and barometric measurements in the nearby town of Mérida in 1912; and 28.6 m smaller than the former official altitude that dated from 1928. These results were published in Spanish in Interciencia and in English in Survey Review.