High-resolution regional gravity field recovery from Poisson wavelets using heterogeneous observational techniques

We adopt Poisson wavelets for regional gravity field recovery using data acquired from various observational techniques; the method combines data of different spatial resolutions and coverage, and various spectral contents and noise levels. For managing the ill-conditioned system, the performances of the zero- and first-order Tikhonov regularization approaches are investigated. Moreover, a direct approach is proposed to properly combine Global Positioning System (GPS)/leveling data with the gravimetric quasi-geoid/geoid, where GPS/leveling data are treated as an additional observation group to form a new functional model. In this manner, the quasi-geoid/geoid that fits the local leveling system can be computed in one step, and no post-processing (e.g., corrector surface or least squares collocation) procedures are needed. As a case study, we model a new reference surface over Hong Kong. The results show solutions with first-order regularization are better than those obtained from zero-order regularization, which indicates the former may be more preferable for regional gravity field modeling. The numerical results also demonstrate the gravimetric quasi-geoid/geoid and GPS/leveling data can be combined properly using this direct approach, where no systematic errors exist between these two data sets. A comparison with 61 independent GPS/leveling points shows the accuracy of the new geoid, HKGEOID-2016, is around 1.1 cm. Further evaluation demonstrates the new geoid has improved significantly compared to the original model, HKGEOID-2000, and the standard deviation for the differences between the observed and computed geoidal heights at all GPS/leveling points is reduced from 2.4 to 0.6 cm. Finally, we conclude HKGEOID-2016 can be substituted for HKGEOID-2000 for engineering purposes and geophysical investigations in Hong Kong. Graphical abstract .