Smoothing impact of isostatic crustal thickness models on local integral inversion of satellite gravity gradiometry data

Abstract

The effects of topographic masses on satellite gradiometric data are large and in order to reduce the magnitude of these effects some compensation mechanisms should be considered. Here we use the isostatic hypotheses of Airy-Heiskanen and the recent Vening Meinesz-Moritz for compensating these effects and to smooth the data prior to their downward continuation to gravity anomaly. The second-order partial derivatives of extended Stokes’ formula are used for the continuations over a topographically rough territory like Persia. The inversions are performed and compared based on two schemes of the remove-compute-restore technique and direct downward continuation. Numerical results show that the topographic-isostatic effect based on Vening Meinesz-Mortiz’s hypothesis smoothes the data better than that based on Airy-Heiskanen’s hypothesis. Also the quality of inversions of the smoothed data by this mechanism is twice better than that of the nonsmoothed ones.