Downward continuation of the free-air gravity anomalies to the ellipsoid using the gradient solution and terrain correction—An attempt of global numerical computations

Abstract

The formulas for the determination of the coefficients of the spherical harmonic expansion of the disturbing potential of the earth are defined for data given on a sphere. In order to determine the spherical harmonic coefficients, the gravity anomalies have to be analytically downward continued from the earth's surface to a sphere—at least to the ellipsoid. The goal of this paper is to continue the gravity anomalies from the earth's surface downward to the ellipsoid using recent elevation models. The basic method for the downward continuation is the gradient solution (theg 1 term). The terrain correction has also been computed because of the role it can play as a correction term when calculating harmonic coefficients from surface gravity data.Theg 1 term and the terrain correction were expanded into the spherical harmonics up to180 th order. The corrections (theg 1 term and the terrain correction) have the order of about 2% of theRMS value of degree variance of the disturbing potential per degree. The influences of theg 1 term and the terrain correction on the geoid take the order of 1 meter (RMS value of corrections of the geoid undulation) and on the deflections of the vertical is of the order 0.1″ (RMS value of correction of the deflections of the vertical).