Mean Free-Air Gravity Anomalies in the Mountains

Mean free-air gravity anomalies are often needed in geodesy for gravity field modelling. Two possible ways of compiling the mean free-air gravity anomalies are discussed. One way is via simple Bouguer gravity anomalies and the second and more time consuming way is via refined Bouguer gravity anomalies. In flat areas the differences between using any of the two ways should not be significant. In the mountains however, every effect introducing a high dependency, such as e.g. terrain effect, can negatively affect the interpolation process. In fact, a numerical experiment conducted in one part of Rocky Mountains revealed large and systematic differences. The effect of these differences on the geoid model is more then two meters in the test area. Our investigation shows that this bias is caused by the location of gravity measurement points, chosen mostly on hill-tops. At such points, the terrain correction to gravity is systematically larger than the mean value of the correction. Therefore, it is not possible to prevent the mean free-air gravity anomalies obtained from simple Bouguer gravity anomalies from having a systematic bias. One can see this bias as a result of the aliasing effect because the simple Bouguer gravity anomalies in the mountains contain a higher frequency signal (terrain effect) that is, according to sampling theorem, impossible to reconstruct by sparse measured gravity data, see e.g. (Goos et al., 2003). Therefore, the more rigorous way of computing the mean free-air gravity anomalies is via refined Bouguer gravity anomalies.