Estimating gravity field and quasi-geoid in Cameroon (CGM20)

Abstract

In this paper, the computation of the new gravimetric quasi-geoid of Cameroon based on some recent global geopotential models and a detailed Digital Terrain Model (DTM) of the area is presented. Besides gravity data supplied by the Bureau Gravimétrique International (BGI) new data have been collected by the National Institute of Cartography (NIC) of Cameroon and used in the computation. Three different quasi-geoid models have been obtained based on three different global models, namely GOCE-dir5, EGM2008 and XGM2019e_2159. The well-known remove-compute-restore technique has been applied and Fast Collocation has been used for estimating the residual quasi-geoid component from gridded gravity data. The comparisons with Global Navigation Satellite System/levelling (GNSS/levelling) data distributed over the Cameroon territory show that some improvements have been obtained either with respect to the global model solutions and to previous local estimates computed in the past.