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Geophysical Prospecting: Update of the precision geoid determination in Korea

From the late 1990s, many studies on local geoid construction have been made in South Korea. However, the precision of the previous geoid has remained about 15 cm due to distribution and quality problems of gravity and GPS/levelling data. Since 2007, new land gravity data and GPS/levelling data have been obtained through many projects such as the Korean Land Spatilaization, Unified Control Point and Gravity survey on the Benchmark. The newly obtained data are regularly distributed to a certain degree and show much better improvement in their quality. In addition, an airborne gravity survey was conducted in 2008 to cover the Korean peninsula (South Korea only). Therefore, it is expected that the precision of the geoid could be improved. In this study, the new South Korean gravimetric geoid and hybrid geoid are presented based on land, airborne, ship‐borne, altimeter gravity data, geopotential model and topographic data. As for the methodology, the general remove‐restore approach was applied with the best chosen parameters in order to produce a precise local geoid. The global geopotential model EGM08 was used to remove the low‐frequency components using degree and order up to 360 and the short wavelength part of the gravity signal was dealt with by using the Shuttle Radar Topography Mission data. The parameters determined empirically in this study include for Stokes’ integral 0.5° and for Wong‐Gore kernel 110–120°, respectively and 10 km for both the Bjerhammar sphere depth and attenuation factor. The final gravimetric geoid in South Korea ranges from 20–31 m with a precision of 5.45 cm overall compared to 1096 GPS/levelling data. In addition, the South Korean hybrid geoid produces 3.46 cm and 3.92 cm for degrees of fitness and precision, respectively and a better statistic of 2.37 cm for plain and urban areas was achieved. The gravimetric and hybrid geoids are expected to improve further when the refined land gravity data are included in the near future.

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