Global geoid adjustment on local area for GIS applications using GNSS permanent station coordinates

Orthometric heights, useful for many engineering and geoscience applications, can be obtained by GPS (Global Positioning System) surveys only when an accurate geoid undulation model (that supplies the vertical separation between the geoid and WGS84 ellipsoid) is available for the considered topic area. Global geoid height models (i.e., EGM2008), deriving from satellite gravity measurements suitably integrated with other data are free available on web, but their accuracy is often not sufficient for the user’s purposes. More accurate local models can nevertheless be acquired, but often only for a fee. GPS/levelling surveys are suitable for determining a local, accurate geoid model, but may be too expensive. This paper aims to demonstrate that GNSS (Global Navigation Satellite System) Permanent Station documents (monographs), freely available on the web and supplying orthometric and ellipsoidal heights, permit to calculate precise geoidal undulations useful to perform global geoid modelling on a local area. In fact, in this study 25 GNSS Permanent Stations (GNSS PS), located in North-Western Italy are considered: the differences between GNSS PS geoidal heights and the corresponding EGM2008 1′ × 1′ ones are used as a starting dataset for Ordinary Kriging applications. The resulting model is summed to the EGM2008 1′ × 1′, obtaining a better-performed model of the interest area. The accuracy tests demonstrate that the resulting model is better than EGM2008 grids to produce contours from a GPS dataset for large-scale mapping.