Local normal height connection across sea with ship-borne gravimetry and GNSS techniques

Heights as the basic geographical information are very important to study marine geophysics, geodesy and oceanography. Based on the astronomical leveling principle, we put forward a new method to unify the normal height (NH) datum along one ship route across sea with the ship-borne gravimetry and global navigation satellite system (GNSS) techniques. Ship-borne gravimeter can precisely measure gravity anomalies and the GNSS technique is used to measure precise sea surface heights (SSHs) along the ship track across sea. Precisions of ship-borne gravities and SSHs are improved with the colinear adjustment. To remove the effects of sea wave and wind, the Gaussian filter is used to filter residuals both between the ship-borne and modeled gravities from EGM2008 to degree 2160, and the measured and modeled SSHs from DTM10MSS, respectively. Deflections of the vertical (DOVs) along the ship route are estimated from the measured gravities with the least squares collocation method. The astro-geodetic survey is made on continent and island to improve the accuracy of DOVs along the route. We use the new method to connect NHs on the coastal sea of Shandong Peninsula, China. The results indicate that the method is very efficient to precisely connect the NH along the ship route across sea.