An Approach to Gravity Anomaly Solution in Airborne Scalar Gravimetry

Airborne scalar gravimetry, a kinematic survey technology, is one of the most efficient techniques to acquire the gravity data in the areas where it is neither practical nor possible to make terrestrial measurement. Recently, studies have shown that the precision reaches sub-mGal. Besides the improvement of the instruments, the data processing and gravity anomaly solution algorithms are evolving consistently. This paper investigates an approach based on developing a state space model and using Kalman filtering and smoothing to determine gravity anomaly. The state space model is developed based on the gravimeter measurement equations and measurement errors equations for the specific airborne gravimetry system. The proposed method is implemented to the airborne data collected in southeast China from GT-1A with a stabilized physical platform. The solution results based on the presented model using Kalman filtering and smoothing confirm that the approach was able to implement the solution and acquire the gravity anomaly information, and the comparison between the proposed method and the traditional method indicates that a remarkable improvement in the solution precision is achieved when the proposed method is used.