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Even though the entire Baltic Sea is included in previous geoid modelling projects such as the NKG2015 and EGG07, the accuracy of contemporary geoid models over marine areas remains unknown, presumably being offshore around 15–20 cm. An important part of the international cooperation project FAMOS (Finalising Surveys for the Baltic Motorways of the Sea) efforts is conducting new marine gravity observations for improving gravimetric quasigeoid modelling. New data is essential to the project as the existing gravimetric data over some regions of the Baltic Sea may be inaccurate and insufficiently scarce for the purpose of 5 cm accuracy geoid modelling. Therefore, it is important to evaluate geoid modelling outcome by independent data, for instance by shipborne GNSS measurements. Accordingly, this study presents results of the ship-borne marine gravity and GNSS campaign held on board the Estonian Maritime Administration survey vessel “Jakob Prei” in West-Estonian archipelago in June/July 2016. Emphasis of the study is on principles of using the GNSS profiles for validation of existing geoid models, post-processing of GNSS raw data and low-pass filtering of the GNSS results. Improvements in geoid modelling using new gravimetric data are also discussed. For example, accuracy of geoid models including the new marine gravity data increased 11 mm as assessed from GNSS profiles. It is concluded that the marine GNSS profiles have a potential in providing complementary constraints in problematic geoid modelling areas.

Ship-borne global navigation satellite system (GNSS) technique can overcome the weakness of satellite altimetry and tide gauge in measuring sea surface heights (SSHs) over coastal seas. Ship-borne GNSS technique can be used to calibrate SSHs determined by the satellite altimetry and tide gauge. The ship-borne GNSS data are processed with the single-epoch precise point positioning (PPP) method to estimate SSHs which are filtered by the Gaussian filter to weaken and/or remove effects of sea wind and wave field. Tidal corrections are also taken into consideration to improve SSHs. One crossover adjustment method is put forward to calculate the bias and drift along the ship route and assess the accuracy of SSHs. We processed the in-situ ship-borne GPS data over the offshore sea around Keelung to compute precisely SSHs with the single-epoch PPP. Statistical results of SSH differences of crossover points indicate that the root mean squares error of SSHs determined by the ship-borne GPS is up to level of 12.9 cm over the offshore sea ~30 km far away to land. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]