The northern European geoid: a case study on long-wavelength geoid errors

O.C.D. Omang, René Forsberg

    Research output: Contribution to journalJournal articleResearchpeer-review

    Abstract

    The long-wavelength geoid errors on large-scale geoid solutions, and the use of modified kernels to mitigate these effects, are studied. The geoid around the Nordic area, from Greenland to the Ural mountains, is considered. The effect of including additional gravity data around the Nordic/Baltic land area, originating from both marine, satellite and ground-based measurements, is studied. It is found that additional data appear to increase the noise level in computations, indicating the presence of systematic errors. Therefore, the Wong-Gore modification to the Stokes kernel is applied. This method of removing lower-order terms in the Stokes kernel appears to improve the geoid. The best fit to the global positioning system (GPS) leveling points is obtained with a degree of modification of approximately 30. In addition to the study of modification errors, the results of different methods of combining satellite altimetry gravity and other gravimetry are presented. They all gave comparable results, at the 6-cm level, when evaluated for the Nordic GPS networks. One dimensional (1-D) and 2-D fast Fourier transform (FFT) methods are also compared. It is shown that even though methods differ by up to 6 cm, the fit to the GPS is essentially the same. A surprising conclusion is that the addition of more data does not always produce a better geoid, illustrating the danger of systematic errors in data.
    Original languageEnglish
    JournalJournal of Geodesy
    Volume76
    Issue number6-7
    Pages (from-to)369-380
    ISSN0949-7714
    Publication statusPublished - 2002

    Keywords

    • satellite altimetry data
    • data combination techniques
    • geoid
    • kernel modification

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