Determination of a Gravimetric Geoid Solution for Andalusia (South Spain)

Abstract

The orthometric heights can be obtained without levelling by means of the ellipsoidal and geoidal heights. For engineering purposes, these orthometric heights must be determined with high accuracy. For this reason, the determination of a high-resolution geoid is necessary. In Andalusia (South Spain) a new geopotential model (EIGEN-GL04C) has been available since the publication of a more recent regional geoid. As a consequence, these new data bring about improvements that ought to be included in a new regional geoid of Andalusia. With this aim in mind, a new gravimetric geoid determination has been carried out, in which these new data have been included. Thus, a new geoid is provided as a data grid distributed for the South Spain area from 36 to 39 degrees of latitude and –7 to –1 degrees of longitude (extending to 3 × 6 degrees), in a 120 × 240 regular grid with a mesh size of 1.5’ × 1.5’ and 28800 points in the GRS80 reference system. This calculated geoid and previous geoids are compared to the geoid undulations obtained for 262 GPS/levelling points, distributed within the study area. The new geoid shows an improvement in accuracy and reliability, fitting the geoidal heights determined for these GPS-levelling points better than any previous geoid.