Combination of deflections of the vertical and gravity anomalies in difficult geological regions, a case study

Abstract

The latest Austrian geoid has been computed by a combination of deflections of the vertical and gravity anomalies using least squares collocation. The computation results revealed regions with large discrepancies between the gravimetric and astro-geodetic geoid solution. One interesting region is the southeast of Austria. Investigations based on Least Squares Collocation have been conducted for this area. The solutions indicate potential reasons for these discrepancies and furthermore, define the criteria for the selection of additional measurement points of deflections of the vertical. For these new measurements the software package ICARUS, developed by Beat Bürki, ETH Zürich, will be used. This paper gives a first overview of the investigations up to summer 2006 which have been performed using a dataset of the southeast of Austria. The simulations clearly indicate erroneous measurements and regions with an insufficient distribution of measured points (deflections of the vertical).