Study of geoid–quasigeoid separation obtained from terrestrial gravity data and two geopotential models

Abstract

In this article, separation between the geoid and the quasigeoid was calculated using ground gravity data and the data extracted from two Global Geopotential Models (GGMs). The calculated results were compared together. To do so, the authors used the terrestrial gravity data in a vast region of Iran, comprising 8,245 stations which are kindly put in our disposal by the National Cartographic Center of Iran, as well as two GGMs, namely EGM96 and EGM2008 for comparison. The calculation of the separation for GGMs was performed by iteration method. The results showed that the geoid–quasigeoid separations obtained from the terrestrial data versus the orthometric heights are nonlinear in mountainous areas, whereas they are almost linear in flat regions due to decreasing the values of the topographic potential of the masses between the earth surface and the geoid. On the other hand, in case of GGMs, a positive correlation was observed between the separations and the orthometric heights in both mountainous and flat areas. As the difference between the separations extracted by two methods in mountainous areas—especially in the regions with ragged topography—differs strongly, it is recommended to use the dense gravity and height networks for accurate determination of the geoid–quasigeoid separation in these regions. Finally, we can conclude that the mean values of separation by two global geopotential models (EGM96 and EGM2008) are 21.87 and 21.23 cm, respectively, values which did not differ strongly, whereas this mean value obtained from ground gravity data is 16.10 cm, which differs from the GGMs’ results with approximately 5 cm.