Strapdown Airborne Gravimetry Research Articles

Dynamic Error Elimination Method for Strapdown Dynamic Gravimetry

In view of the fact that there are dynamic errors in the strapdown dynamic gravimetry, based on the analysis of the error mechanism of the strapdown dynamic gravimetry, a general model to compensate the dynamic error of the strapdown dynamic gravimetry is proposed, and the constraints are established by using the correlation analysis; then, the parameters of the model are estimated. The effectiveness of the proposed method is verified by using the strapdown airborne gravimetry data under the undulated flight conditions. The results show that the repeatability of the repeated gravity measurements under 160-s filtering is improved from 1.41 to 0.70 mGal, while the result under 300-s filtering is 0.62 mGal. It shows that this method can effectively eliminate the dynamic error while maintaining the spatial resolution.

Results from the first strapdown airborne gravimetry campaign over the Lake District of Turkey

The first production-oriented strapdown airborne gravimetry in Turkey was carried out during fall 2019 over the Turkish Lake District. Comparisons at the large amounts of crossover points yield RMSE values below 1 mGal level, and the external comparison with the latest high-resolution global geopotential model (GGM) shows a mean bias of around 1.1 mGal where the largest deviations are observed on the areas that could not be resolved by the GGM. The incorporation of new airborne data into the gravity field computations is supposed to reduce the errors stem from the data voids and enhance the maps for better interpretations.

The Use of Gravity Reductions in the Indirect Strapdown Airborne Gravimetry Processing

Strapdown airborne gravimetry (SAG) is one of the most efficient techniques used in geodesy and geophysics for acquiring gravity data on relatively large regions in a faster and cost-effective way or to fill in the gravity data gaps on areas where it is neither practical nor possible to make terrestrial measurements. Recent studies have shown that accuracies of 1 mGal and precision of sub-mGal levels are possible with the strapdown inertial systems modified for gravimetry (e.g., temperature stabilization). Besides the advancements in the instrumentation, data processing and integration algorithms are evolving consistently. This study investigates the contribution of long- and short-wavelength gravity reductions following the remove–restore procedure in the indirect SAG processing, where the gravity disturbance at flight altitude is modeled stochastically as an additional system state in the Kalman filter sense. The proposed method is implemented to the airborne data collected in central Turkey in 2018 with a thermally stabilized strapdown inertial measurement unit of navigation-grade type. The inclusion of the long- and short-wavelength gravity reductions in the SAG processing limits the in-run bias variations of the Z-accelerometer and changes the parameters of the third-order Gauss–Markov gravity state model significantly. Utilization of the reduced gravity disturbance in the processing provides better long-wavelength stability in the solution by reducing the mean bias of about 2.60 to 0.65 mGal between the airborne gravity estimates and a high-resolution global gravity model. Moreover, a remarkable improvement in the internal precision is achieved when the gravity reductions are introduced into the SAG solution. Comparisons at the crossover points demonstrate that the application of gravity reductions yields considerably lower crossover residuals than the standard solution without reductions. The non-adjusted crossover differences of the long- and short-wavelength removed and restored SAG solution result in an RMSE value of 0.79 mGal, that is, 40% better precision than the standard solution.

Improving Strapdown Airborne Gravimetry by Yaw Tracking Rotation Modulation

Cai, S.; Lu, S.; Zhao, L.; Wang, M.; Yu, R.; Cao, J.; Wu, M., and Xu, X., 2020. Improving strapdown airborne gravimetry by yaw tracking rotation modulation. In: Zheng, C.W.; Wang, Q.; Zhan, C., and Yang, S.B. (eds.), Air-Sea Interaction and Coastal Environments of the Maritime and Polar Silk Roads. Journal of Coastal Research, Special Issue No. 99, pp. 373–381. Coconut Creek (Florida), ISSN 0749-0208.Strapdown airborne gravimetry is a classical method to obtain the high quality gravity disturbance information. However, the horizontal components of the strapdown vector gravimetry are still potential for improvement. Residual error in navigation frame, originated from attitude error and accelerometer bias, is the main factor affecting the accuracy of the vector gravimetry. Theoretical analysis and actual repeat line data show that the variation of the flight direction would change the sign of the residual error, and this will create biases in the results of the survey lines in different direction. Therefore, keeping the yaw angle unchanged could eliminate the effect of residual error in strapdown gravimetry; this could be achieved by single axis rotation modulation. In this paper, strapdown vector gravimetry with yaw tracking rotation modulation technique is proposed to conquer the effect of residual bias. Simulation results show that the errors of horizontal gravity disturbance are reduced from 3.45 mGal and 4.59 mGal to 2.48 mGal and 1.77 mGal after using the improved gravimetry scheme.

Impact of temperature stabilization on the strapdown airborne gravimetry: a case study in Central Turkey

Airborne gravimetry with strapdown inertial sensors has been a valuable tool for many years to fill in the gravity data gaps on the areas not accessible by land. Accuracies of 1 mGal level with off-the-shelf navigation-grade inertial measurement units (IMU) can only be achieved provided that the accelerometer drifts mainly caused by the temperature variations inside the IMU housing are separated from the gravity signal. Although there are several strategies proposed in the literature to deal with this inseparability problem, we use a thermal stabilization system (iTempStab) added on an iNAT-RQH navigation-grade IMU and investigate its performance over a test region in central Turkey with moderate topography and highly qualified ground truth gravity data. Two test flights were performed in 2017 and 2018 with and without iTempStab add-on following almost the same flight trajectories. During the first flight in 2017 with iNAT-RQH only, which lasted almost 5.5 h, there were considerable temperature variations inside the IMU housing from 39.1 to 46.0 °C. A simple thermal correction based on a laboratory calibration done before the flight was applied to the vertical Z-accelerometer in the pre-processing stage. However, temperature changes were within 0.1 °C during the second test flight in 2018 with TempStab add-on. The temperature stabilization gained by the iTempStab add-on produced better cross-over statistics. While the RMSE of the non-adjusted cross-over residuals was about 2.6 mGal, it reduced by 50% with iTempStab add-on. The adjusted cross-over differences of the 2018 flight yielded an RMSE of about 0.5 mGal, which is a remarkable precision for the strapdown gravimetry. The comparison with upward continued ground gravity data at flight altitudes suggests that the thermal stabilization system shows also remarkable improvements in the residual statistics. The range of the residuals decreases from ± 10 to ± 5 mGal, the standard deviation decreases from 2.19 to 0.94 mGal, and the RMSE decreases from 2.24 to 1.48 mGal, respectively, with the iTempStab add-on. It can be concluded that the thermal stabilization system significantly improves the accelerometer stability and therefore the precision and accuracy of the strapdown airborne gravity estimates.

Improving the Strapdown Airborne Vector Gravimetry by a Backward Inertial Navigation Algorithm.

Strapdown airborne gravimetry is an efficient way to obtain gravity field data. A new method has been developed to improve the accuracy of airborne vector gravimetry. The method introduces a backward strapdown navigation algorithm into the strapdown gravimetry, which is the reverse process of forward algorithm. Compared with the forward algorithm, the backward algorithm has the same performance in the condition of no sensor error, but has different error characteristics in actual conditions. The differences of the two algorithms in the strapdown gravimetry data processing are presented by simulations, which show that the two algorithms have different performance in the horizontal attitude measurement and convergence of integrated navigation filter. On the basis of detailed analysis, the procedures of accuracy improvement method are presented. The result of this method is very promising when applying to an actual flight test carried out by a SGA-WZ02 strapdown gravimeter. After applying the proposed method, the repeatability of two gravity disturbance horizontal components were 1.83 mGal and 1.80 mGal under the resolution of 6 km, which validate the effectiveness of the method. Furthermore, the wavenumber correlation filter is also discussed as an alternative data fusion method.

Strapdown Airborne Gravimetry Quality Assessment Method Based on Single Survey Line Data: A Study by SGA-WZ02 Gravimeter.

Quality assessment is an important part in the strapdown airborne gravimetry. Root mean square error (RMSE) evaluation method is a classical way to evaluate the gravimetry quality, but classical evaluation methods are preconditioned by extra flight or reference data. Thus, a method, which is able to largely conquer the premises of classical quality assessment methods and can be used in single survey line, has been developed in this paper. According to theoretical analysis, the method chooses the stability of two horizontal attitude angles, horizontal specific force and vertical specific force as the determinants of quality assessment method. The actual data, collected by SGA-WZ02 from 13 flights 21 lines in certain survey, was used to build the model and elaborate the method. To substantiate the performance of the quality assessment model, the model is applied in extra repeat line flights from two surveys. Compared with internal RMSE, standard deviation of assessment residuals are 0.23 mGal and 0.16 mGal in two surveys, which shows that the quality assessment method is reliable and stricter. The extra flights are not necessary by specially arranging the route of flights. The method, summarized from SGA-WZ02, is a feasible approach to assess gravimetry quality using single line data and is also suitable for other strapdown gravimeters.

Airborne Gravity Data Denoising Based on Empirical Mode Decomposition: A Case Study for SGA-WZ Greenland Test Data

Surveying the Earth’s gravity field refers to an important domain of Geodesy, involving deep connections with Earth Sciences and Geo-information. Airborne gravimetry is an effective tool for collecting gravity data with mGal accuracy and a spatial resolution of several kilometers. The main obstacle of airborne gravimetry is extracting gravity disturbance from the extremely low signal to noise ratio measuring data. In general, the power of noise concentrates on the higher frequency of measuring data, and a low pass filter can be used to eliminate it. However, the noise could distribute in a broad range of frequency while low pass filter cannot deal with it in pass band of the low pass filter. In order to improve the accuracy of the airborne gravimetry, Empirical Mode Decomposition (EMD) is employed to denoise the measuring data of two primary repeated flights of the strapdown airborne gravimetry system SGA-WZ carried out in Greenland. Comparing to the solutions of using finite impulse response filter (FIR), the new results are improved by 40% and 10% of root mean square (RMS) of internal consistency and external accuracy, respectively.

A Comparison Between Three IMUs for Strapdown Airborne Gravimetry

Strapdown airborne gravimetry relies on the combination of an inertial measuring unit (IMU) and a global navigation satellite system (GNSS) to measure the Earth’s gravity field. Early results with navigation-grade IMUs showed similar accuracies to those obtained with scalar gravimetric systems in the down component. This paper investigates the accuracy of three IMUs used for strapdown airborne gravimetry under the same flight conditions. The three systems considered were navigation-grade IMUs, iXSea AIRINS and iMAR iNAV-FMS, and a tactical-grade Litton LN-200. The data were collected in 2010 over the Island of Madeira, Portugal, in the scope of GEOid over MADeira campaign. The coordinates and orientation of the aircraft were computed using an extended Kalman filter based on the inertial navigation approach. GNSS position and velocity observations were used to update the filter, and the gravity disturbance was considered to be a stochastic process and was part of the state vector. A new crossover point-based serial tuning was introduced to deal with the uncertainty of choosing the filter’s a priori information. The results show that with the iXSea accuracies of 2.1 and 1.6 mGal can be obtained for 1.7 and 5.0 km of spatial resolution (half-wavelength), respectively. iMAR’s results were significantly affected by a nonlinear drift, which led to lower accuracies of 4.1–5.5 mGal. Remarkably, Litton showed very consistent results and achieved an accuracy of about 4.5 mGal at 5 km of spatial resolution (half-wavelength).