Experimental study on improving the accuracy of marine gravimetry by combining moving-base gravimeters with GNSS antenna array

Abstract

Abstract The gravity field is one of the Earth’s basic physical fields. The geoid can be calculated and the tectonic activity underground can be inversed by gravity anomaly. With the development of various ship-borne gravimeters and navigation technology, including the Global Navigation Satellite System (GNSS) and Strapdown Inertial Navigation System (SINS), the precision of marine gravimetry has been significantly improved (achieve or better than 1mGal). Errors arising from calculations of the correction term have become the main source of gravity measurement errors. At present, the traditional approach is to deploy a GNSS antenna, connect the GNSS antenna to the gravimeter, record the real-time position through data acquisition software, and then use this position to calculate the gravity correction item afterward. Two errors are inevitable. (1) The GNSS antenna position error is large. The pseudorange point positioning method is generally used to obtain real-time GNSS antenna positions, and the positioning accuracy is poor compared with that of precise point positioning. (2) The position coordinates of the gravimeter contain systematic errors related to the ship’s attitude. In this paper, a joint experiment including GNSS antenna arrays and ship-borne gravimeters was designed to evaluate the measurement accuracy via repeat lines on the same ship. The experimental results show the following: (1) attitude accuracies of 0.0299° for the yaw angle, 0.0361° for the pitch angle, and 0.1671° for the roll angle can be obtained at baseline lengths of 25 and 4 m. (2) The GNSS antenna array has an obvious role in determining the point acceleration in the low-frequency band (0–0.01 Hz) and the point position and velocity in the high-frequency band (0.01–1 Hz). (3) The vertical position eccentricity causes an absolute error of 1 mGal and a relative error of $${10}^{-1}$$ 10 - 1 mGal in gravity measurements and can be corrected by the GNSS antenna array method. (4) Using a GNSS antenna array can obviously improve the measurement accuracy of an instrument with a precision equaling or exceeding 1 mGal, but cannot obviously improve that to an instrument with poor precision (2 mGal or below).

Keywords

• Marine gravimetry
• GNSS antenna array
• Moving-base gravimeter
• Attitude