Fourier geoid determination with irregular data

Abstract

The fast Fourier transform (FFT) and, recently, the fast Hartley transform (FHT) have been extensively used by geodesists for efficient geoid determination. For this kind of efficiency, data must be given on a regular grid and, consequently, a pre-processing step of interpolation is required when only point measurements are available. This paper presents a way of computing a grid of geoid undulations N without explicitly gridding the data. The method is applicable to all FFT or FHT techniques of geoid or terrain effects determination, and it works with planar as well as spherical formulas. This method can be used not only for, e.g., computing a grid of undulations from irregular gravity anomalies Δg but it also lends itself to other applications, such as the gridding of gravity anomalies and, since the contribution of each data point is computed individually, the update of N- or Δg-grids as soon as new point measurements become available. In the case that there are grid cells which contain no measurements, the results of gravity interpolation or geoid estimation can be drastically improved by incorporating into the procedure a frequency-domain interpolating function. In addition to numerical results obtained using a few simple interpolating functions, the paper presents briefly the mathematical formulas for recovering missing grid values and for transforming values from one grid to another which might be rotated and/or scaled with respect to the first one. The geodetic problems where these techniques may find applications are pointed out throughout the paper.