Construction of the airborne gravity based geoid and its evaluation

To obtain the gravity data with consistent quality and good distribution over Korea, to overcome the difficulties in constructing precision geoid from biased distribution of ground data, to resolve the discrepancy between the ground and ocean gravity data, an airborne gravity survey was conducted from Dec. 2008 to Jan. 2009. The data was measured at the average flying height of 3,000m and the data with cross-over error of 2.21mGal is obtained. The geoid constructed using this airborne gravity data shows the range of 9.34 ∼ 33.88m. Comparing the geoid with respect to the GPS/levelling data, a precision of 0.145m is obtained. After fitting, the degree of fit to GPS/levelling data was calculated about 5 cm. It was found that there exists large biases in the area of south-western and northern part of the peninsular which is considered to be the effect of distorted vertical datum in Korea. Thus, more investigation on vertical datum would be needed in near future.