Regional gravity field modeling based on rectangular harmonic analysis.

Regional gravity field modeling with high-precision and high-resolution is one of the most important scientific objectives in geodesy, and can provide fundamental information for geophysics, geodynamics, seismology, and mineral exploration. Rectangular harmonic analysis (RHA) is proposed for regional gravity field modeling in this paper. By solving the Laplace's equation of gravitational potential in local Cartesian coordinate system, the rectangular harmonic expansions of disturbing potential, gravity anomaly, gravity disturbance, geoid undulation and deflection of the vertical are derived, and so are the formula for signal degree variance and error degree variance of the rectangular harmonic coefficients (RHC). We also present the mathematical model and detailed algorithm for the solution of RHC using RHA from gravity observations. In order to reduce the edge effects caused by periodic continuation in RHA, we propose the strategy of extending the size of computation domain. The RHA-based modeling method is validated by conducting numerical experiments based on simulated ground and airborne gravity data that are generated from geopotential model EGM2008 and contaminated by Gauss white noise with standard deviation of 2 mGal. The accuracy of the 2.5′×2.5′ geoid undulations computed from ground and airborne gravity data is 1 and 1.4 cm, respectively. The standard error of the gravity disturbances that downward continued from the flight height of 4 km to the geoid is only 3.1 mGal. Numerical results confirm that RHA is able to provide a reliable and accurate regional gravity field model, which may be a new option for the representation of the fine structure of regional gravity field. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]