A synthetic Earth gravity model based on a topographic-isostatic model

The Earth’s gravity field is related to the topographic potential in medium and higher degrees, which is isostatically compensated. Hence, the topographic-isostatic (TI) data are indispensable for extending an available Earth Gravitational Model (EGM) to higher degrees. Here we use TI harmonic coefficients to construct a Synthetic Earth Gravitational Model (SEGM) to extend the EGMs to higher degrees. To achieve a high-quality SEGM, a global geopotential model (EGM96) is used to describe the low degrees, whereas the medium and high degrees are obtained from the TI or topographic potential. This study differes from others in that it uses a new gravimetric-isostatic model for determining the TI potential. We test different alternatives based on TI or only topographic data to determine the SEGM. Although the topography is isostatically compensated only to about degree 40–60, our study shows that using a compensation model improves the SEGM in comparison with using only topographic data for higher degree harmonics. This is because the TI data better adjust the applied Butterworth filter, which bridges the known EGM and the new high-degree potential field than the topographic data alone.