COMPARATIVE STUDY OF GRAVITY ANOMALY ESTIMATION METHODS

Abstract

Gravity data is required in the form of gravity anomalies at every point of the earth's surface in order to achieve the aim of geodesy, i.e., determining the shape and size of earth. Besides this, knowledge of gravity anomaly is required in some other branches of science such as geophysics, geology, space science etc. for scientific investigations. Though Gravity is a measurable quantity, it is impossible to make measurement for the entire earth's surface. Consequently, we obtain the gravity field data by some method of prediction for the areas where gravity measurements have not been carried out due to some or the other reasons. Albeit there are several methods available for the estimation of gravity anomalies, in the present work estimation of gravity anomaly using few estimation methods have been studied. Results obtained indicate that these methods can be used satisfactorily for geophysical and regional geodetic studies only. III