New ultrahigh-resolution picture of Earth's gravity field
Abstract
provide an unprecedented ultrahigh resolution picture of Earth's gravity over all continents and numerous islands within ±60° latitude. This is achieved through augmentation of new satellite and terrestrial gravity with topography data and use of massive parallel computation techniques, delivering local detail at ~200 m spatial resolution. As such, our work is the first-of-its-kind to model gravity at unprecedented fine scales yet with near-global coverage. The new picture of Earth's gravity encompasses a suite of gridded estimates of gravity accelerations, radial and horizontal field components, and quasi-geoid heights at over 3 billion points covering 80% of Earth's land masses. We identify new candidate locations of extreme gravity signals, suggesting that the Committee on Data for Science and Technology standard for peak-to-peak variations in free-fall gravity is too low by about 40%. The new models are beneficial for a wide range of scientific and engineering applications and freely available to the public.
- Publication:
-
Geophysical Research Letters
- Pub Date:
- August 2013
- DOI:
- 10.1002/grl.50838
- Bibcode:
- 2013GeoRL..40.4279H
- Keywords:
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- Earth's gravity field;
- gravity;
- quasi-geoid;
- vertical deflections;
- ultrahigh resolution