Merging of airborne gravity and gravity derived from satellite altimetry: Test cases along the coast of greenland

The National Survey and Cadastre - Denmark (KMS) has for several years produced gravity anomaly maps over the oceans derived from satellite altimetry. During the last four years, KMS has also conducted airborne gravity surveys along the coast of Greenland dedicated to complement the existing onshore gravity coverage and fill in new data in the very-near coastal area, where altimetry data may contain gross errors.

The airborne surveys extend from the coastline to approximately 100 km offshore, along 6000 km of coastline. An adequate merging of these different data sources is important for the use of gravity data especially, when computing geoid models in coastal regions. The presence of reliable marine gravity data for independent control offers an opportunity to study procedures for the merging of airborne and satellite data around Greenland.

Two different merging techniques, both based on collocation, are investigated in this paper. Collocation offers a way of combining the individual airborne gravity observation with either the residual geoid observations derived from satellite altimetry or with gravity derived from these data using the inverse Stokes method implemented by Fast Fourier Transform (FFT).