New ultrahigh-resolution picture of Earth's gravity field

Christian Hirt, Sten Claessens, Thomas Fecher, Michael Kuhn, Roland Pail, Moritz Rexer

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

210 Scopus citations

Abstract

We 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. Key Points Satellite, terrestrial and topographic gravity combined at ~200 m resolution Model covers all continents within SRTM data, and developing countries Gravity accelerations on Earth estimated to vary within ~7000 mGal, or 0.7 %..

Original languageEnglish
Pages (from-to)4279-4283
Number of pages5
JournalGeophysical Research Letters
Volume40
Issue number16
DOIs
StatePublished - 28 Aug 2013

Keywords

  • Earth's gravity field
  • gravity
  • quasi-geoid
  • ultrahigh resolution
  • vertical deflections

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