In this work the question is examinated, which geoid accuracies can be achieved from gravity field functionals which are measured at discrete, but very dense points. The difficult conditions for the required modeling of the topography in mountainous terrain have been considered. In the Estergebirge mountains in the Bavarian Alps since the year 1994 a very dense network of gravity measurements, precision levelings, precise GPS height measurements and deflections of the vertical has been created, covering all height zones of the terrain. These measurements and their accuracies are described in this work. From leveling, gravity measurements and GPS measurements height anomalies and geoid heights have been determined, analyzed and compared to the german EGG97 geoid model. A precise modeling of the topographic attraction is described for gravity and the deflections of the vertical, based on a high resolution terrain model and a terrain survey of the very near zone of each data point. After the topographic reduction different disturbing bodies with anomalous densities have been detected, with typical characteristics for mountainous areas. Some of these bodies have been modeled taking into account various geophysical data. The models have been used in an adjustment to determine the densities of the topography and the disturbing bodies. In the second part a statistical analysis of gravity disturbances from the Estergebirge and from other data sets from the Alps is carried out. Empirical signal covariance functions and spectral representations of signal power are shown. The comparison of the different data sets shows good agreement of signal properties. Using measurements in independent control points realistic errors for the continuous representation of the gravity disturbances have been obtained, depending on the density of data points. It is shown, that for high point densities the high frequent parts of the signal are still dominating the representation error, whereas errors of measurement and modeling play a minor role. The representation error computed for selected data point densities have been propagated to geoid errors and errors of spherical harmonic coefficients. The error volume is used as an intermediate step, assuming homogeneous signal properties all over the earth. By this approach it can be shown, that for a geoid error standard deviation of 1 cm the spacing of gravity measurements may not exceed about 5 km.
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In this work the question is examinated, which geoid accuracies can be achieved from gravity field functionals which are measured at discrete, but very dense points. The difficult conditions for the required modeling of the topography in mountainous terrain have been considered. In the Estergebirge mountains in the Bavarian Alps since the year 1994 a very dense network of gravity measurements, precision levelings, precise GPS height measurements and deflections of the vertical has been created,...
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