Direct BEM for high-resolution global gravity field modelling

Abstract

The paper presents a high-resolution global gravity field modelling by the boundary element method (BEM). A direct BEM formulation for the Laplace equation is applied to get a numerical solution of the linearized fixed gravimetric boundary-value problem. The numerical scheme uses the collocation method with linear basis functions. It involves a discretization of the complicated Earth’s surface, which is considered as a fixed boundary. Here 3D positions of collocation points are simulated from the DNSC08 mean sea surface at oceans and from the SRTM30PLUS_V5.0 global topography model added to EGM96 on lands. High-performance computations together with an elimination of the far zones’ interactions allow a very refined integration over the all Earth’s surface with a resolution up to 0.1 deg. Inaccuracy of the approximate coarse solutions used for the elimination of the far zones’ interactions leads to a long-wavelength error surface included in the obtained numerical solution. This paper introduces an iterative procedure how to reduce such long-wavelength error surface. Surface gravity disturbances as oblique derivative boundary conditions are generated from the EGM2008 geopotential model. Numerical experiments demonstrate how the iterative procedure tends to the final numerical solutions that are converging to EGM2008. Finally the input surface gravity disturbances at oceans are replaced by real data obtained from the DNSC08 altimetryderived gravity data. The ITG-GRACE03S satellite geopotential model up to degree 180 is used to eliminate far zones’ interactions. The final high-resolution global gravity field model with the resolution 0.1 deg is compared with EGM2008.