Regional Gravity Field Model of Egypt Based on Satellite and Terrestrial Data

Abstract

This study presents a recent combined regional gravity field model over Egypt, developed by integrating satellite and terrestrial data via applying the remove-compute-restore (RCR) principle and the least-squares collocation (LSC) procedure. A high-resolution digital terrain model was exploited for the computation of the terrain and residual terrain corrections. Hereby, all the signals that can be modelled or deterministically computed are considered known and then removed in order to reduce the order of magnitude of the input gravity data prior to applying the LSC. Several GOCE-only and combined global geopotential models (GGMs) have been thoroughly investigated with respect to the EGM2008, in which the space-wise (SPW) solution, namely the SPW-R5 model, demonstrated the best performance. For the development of the combined model, the SPW-R5 GGM has been integrated with both the EGM2008 GGM and the terrestrial data retrieved from 56,250 gravity stations of the Getech data, acquired in the framework of the African Gravity Project. The combined regional gravity model was compared to the state-of-art XGM2016 global gravity model. The standard deviation of the differences is 18.0 mGal in terms of Bouguer anomalies. The combined regional model fits well with the terrestrial gravity data along the chosen North–South oriented profile through the Nile Delta region. The improvements of the developed combined regional model over the XGM2016 are due to the use of a more extensive terrestrial dataset. In conclusion, our model is more suitable than solely using the ground data or GGMs for regional density modelling over Egypt. As an example, the comparison of using a global or regionally defined gravity model with the forward gravity modelling based on Saleh (Acta Geodaetica et Geophysica Hungarica 47(4):402–429, 2012) density model is performed.