Baltic Sea Level project with GPS

Abstract

In order to study the Baltic Sea Level change and to unify national height systems a two week GPS campaign was performed in the region in Autumn 1990. Parties from Denmark, Finland, Germany, Poland and Sweden carried out GPS measurements at 26 tide gauges along the Baltic sea and 8 VLBI and SLR fiducial stations with baseline lengths ranging from 230 km to 1600 km. The observations were processed in the network mode with the Bernese version 3.3 software using orbit improvement techniques. To get rid of the scale error introduced by the ionospheric refraction from single-frequency data, the local models of the ionosphere were estimated using L4 observations. The tropospheric zenith corrections were also considered. The preliminary results show average root mean square (RMS) errors of about ±3 cm in the horizontal position and ±7 cm in the vertical position relative to the Potsdam SLR station in ITRF89 system. After transformation of the GPS results to geoid heights using the levelled heights, an absolute comparison with gravimetric geoid heights using the least squares modification of Stokes' formula (LSMS), the modified Molodensky and the NKG Scandinavian geoid 1989 (NGK-89) models gives a standard deviation of the difference of ±7cm to ±9cm for the NKG-89 model and of ±9cm to ±30cm for the LSMS and the modified Molodensky model. The Swedish height system is found to be about 8-37cm higher than those of the other Baltic countries for NKG-89 model.