A comparison of the gravimetric geoid and the geometric geoid using GPS/leveling data

The geoid is the level surface that closely approximates mean sea level and usually used for the origin of vertical datum. For the computation of geoid, various sources of gravity measurements are used in South Korea and, as a consequence, the geoid models may show different results, however, a limited analysis has been performed due to a lack of controlled data, namely the GPS/Leveling data. Therefore, in this study, the gravimetric geoids are compared with the geodetic geoid which is obtained through the GPS/Leveling procedures. The gravimetric geoids are categorized into geoid from airborne gravimetry, geoid from the terrestrial gravimetry, NGII geoid(geoids published by National Geographic Information Institute) and NORI geoid(geoi published by National Oceanographic Research Institute), respectively. For the analysis, the geometric geoid is obtained at each unified national control point and the difference between geodetic and gravimetric geoid is computed. Also, the geoid height data is gridded on a regular 10 × 10-km grid so that the FFT method can be applied to analyze the geoid height differences in frequency domain. The results show that no significant differences in standard deviation are observed when the geoids from the airborne and terrestrial gravimetry are compared with the geomertric geoid while relatively large difference are shown when NGII geoid and NORI geoid are compared with geometric geoid. Also, NGII geoid and NORI geoid are analyzed in frequency domain and the deviations occurs in long-wavelength domain.