Friday, 31 August 2007 - 11:40 AM
5.A.A-4

Regional geoid and gravity field from a combination of airborne and satellite data in Dronning Maud Land, East Antarctica

Jan Müller1, Sven Riedel2, Mirko Scheinert1, Martin Horwath1, Reinhard Dietrich1, Daniel Steinhage2, Helgard Anschütz2, and Wilfried Jokat2. (1) Institut fuer Planetare Geodaesie, TU Dresden, Helmholtzstr. 10, Dresden, 01062, Germany, (2) Alfred Wegener Institute for Polar and Marine Research, Am Alten Hafen 26, Bremerhaven, 27568, Germany

A variety of gravity observations in Antarctica has recently become available through extensive efforts of airborne surveys. Aircraft serving as multi-instrumentation platforms provide measurements on gravity, bedrock topography, ice surface topography and ice thickness. Collected datasets are valuable in terms of resolution and homogeneity,which make them suitable for studying regional geoid determination in selected Antarctic regions. Within this context the German joint project VISA provided an excellent database for improving the regional geoid by combining gravity and topographic data from aerogeophysical observations with long-wavelength information from global gravity field models. Using the remove-compute-restore technique in conjunction with least-squares collocation, a regional geoid for Dronning Maud Land, East Antarctica, has been derived. A signal threshold of up to 6~m added to the global model that was used as a basis can be expected. The accuracy of the regional geoid will be estimated to be at the level of 15~cm.

[Manuscript]