Modelling the fine-structure of the geoid: Methods, data requirements and some results

Abstract

The requirements for precise geoid models on local and regional scales have increased in recent years, primarily due to the ongoing developments in height determination by GPS on land, but also due to oceanographic requirements in using satellite altimetry for recovering dynamic sea-surface topography. Suitable methods for geoid computations from gravity data include Stokes integration, FFT methods, and least-squares collocation. Especially the FFT methods are efficient in handling large amounts of gravity data, and new variants of the methods taking earth curvature rigorously into account provide attractive methods for obtaining continental-scale, high-resolution geoid models. The accuracy of such models may be from 2–5 cm locally, to 50–100 cm on regional scales, depending on gravity data coverage, long wave-length gravity field errors, and datum problems. When approaching the cm-level geoid basic geoid definition questions (geoid or quasigeoid?) become very significant, especially in rugged areas.

In the paper the geoid modelling methods and problems are reviewed, and some investigations on local data requirements for cm-level geoid prediction are presented. Some actual results are presented from Scandinavia, where a recent regional high-resolution geoid model yields apparent accuracies of 2–10 cm over GPS baselines of 50 to 2000 km.