The Bruns formula in three dimensions

The Bruns formula is generalized to three dimensions with the derivation of equations expressing the height anomaly vector or the geoid undulation vector as a function of the disturbing gravity potential and its spatial derivatives. It is shown that the usual scalar Bruns formula provides not the separation along the normal to the reference ellipsoid but the component of the relevant spatial separation along the local direction of normal gravity. The above results which hold for any type of normal potential are specialized for the usual Somigliana-Pizzetti normal field so that the components of the geoid undulation vector are expressed as functions of the parameters of the reference ellipsoid, the disturbing potential and its spatial derivatives with respect to three types of curvilinear coordinates, ellipsoidal, geodetic and spherical. Finally the components of the geoid undulation vector are related to the deflections of the vertical in a spherical approximation.