Performance estimate of some prototypes of inertial platform and strapdown marine gravimeters

Abstract Marine gravimeter has been proved to be the primary technique to efficiently obtain middle-to-short wavelength signals of the earth’s gravity field in geodesy, geodynamics and marine sciences research. In recent years, some prototypes of inertial platform and strapdown marine gravimeters have been developed, where the inertial platform gravimeter systems include CHZ-II and ZL11, and strapdown gravimeter systems include SAG-2M and SGA-WZ. In order to validate the performance of these marine gravimeter prototypes, a synchronous test with the widely used gravimeters GT-2M and LCR arranged on the same vessel was carried out in the north of South China Sea. All the data are processed according to the survey standard flow, and the performance is estimated by analyzing the errors of the repeat lines and the crossover points under the same environment. The compared results show that all the six gravimeters can meet the precision requirement of marine gravity survey. Meanwhile, the precision results of the improved gravimeters can get close to the precision of gravimeter GT-2M, higher than the precision gravimeter LCR.