Gravity modeling and application to the gravity referenced navigation

The gravity anomaly is a basic geophysical data applied in various fields such as geophysics, geodesy and national defense. In general, the gravity anomaly is used through a interpolation process based on the constructed database. The gravity variation, however, is appeared in various shapes depending on the topography and the density of the underground structures. Therefore, the interpolation could lead to a large differences if the gravity fields do not satisfy the assumptions on the signal behavior like linear or a certain degree polynomials. Furthermore, the interpolation does not reflect the physical characteristics of the gravity such as the harmonic condition. In this study, the gravity modeling using the plane Fourier series and radial basis functions are performed to overcome the problems in the usual interpolation. The results of the modeling is analyzed for the case of the gravity referenced navigation focused on the signal characteristics. Based on the study, it was found that the results from modeling are not much different to that from the interpolation in a smoothly varied area. In case of the highly varied area, however, a large differences are appeared among the three methods. Especially, the Fourier series shows the most smooth variations in the modeled gravity values while the highest variations appeared in the interpolation. Applying to the gravity referenced navigation, it was found that the modeling is more effective in calculation cost. It is considered that the results from this study provides a basis on effective modeling of the gravity fields in terms of the signal characteristics and resolution for various application fields.