Free-air anomaly from airborne gravity surveying

The gravity data collected and reserved in Korea is seriously biased in its distribution. That is, only the west-southern part of the peninsula including Chungcheong and Jeonla area has dense distribution while only a part is covered in Gyoungsang area. Especially, the low density of the gravity data in mountainous area basically limits the accuracy of the gravimetric geoid in Korea. As one of the solution to overcome the problem, an airborne gravity survey were conducted from Dec. 2008 ∼ Jan. 2009. In this study, free-air gravity anomaly derived from the airborne gravity data which has consistent quality are presented. The data processing for the airborne gravity is composed of several corrections of errors such as errors from gravity measurement, errors from flight dynamics, errors from GPS, and errors from time synchronization. We presented detailed explanations on the data processing with the find cross-over results. The free-air anomaly from airborne gravity finally shows the cross-over accuracy of 2.21mGal which reflects the precision of each track is 1.56mGal. It is expected that the result from this study will play a role as input data in precision geoid determination with ground and ship-borne gravity data after appropriate fusion process.