engleski

The GEOMED 2 project: A high resolution geoid of the Mediterranean Sea

The Mediterranean Sea has always been of economic and ecological importance to its surrounding countries. A better understanding of its currents is necessary for the management of fishery resources, potential pollution, and maritime security. Currents can be derived from the Mean Dynamic sea surface Topography (MDT), which can be estimated by subtracting the geoid from the Mean Sea Surface obtained by radar altimetry. The main scope of the GEOMED 2 project is the determination of a high-accuracy and high-resolution geoid model for the Mediterranean Sea employing land and marine gravity data, GOCE/GRACE based Global Geopotential Models and SRTM/bathymetry terrain models. The processing methodology will be based on the well-known remove-compute-restore method following both stochastic and spectral methods for the determination of the geoid. The estimated geoid model will form the basis for height-system unification and MDT determination for the estimation of the circulation in the Mediterranean Sea. In this work, the pre-processing steps consisting in merging and validating all the available gravity observations for the wider Mediterranean are presented and discussed. Furthermore, in selected test areas, geoid undulations are estimated from the validated gravity data by using different methods such as collocation and Stokes formula. These preliminary computations will serve as a basis for assessing and refining the methodology to be applied in the final geoid computation over the entire Mediterranean basin.

geoid; Mediterranean Sea; GEOMED

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