The exact implementation of a spherical harmonic model for gravimetric quantities

Abstract

This note presents formulas to evaluate a spherical harmonic model of Earth’s gravitational potential for essential gravimetric quantities without spherical and linear approximation. Typically, 10–13 significant digits of numerical accuracy for such computations are obtained over the globe using EGM2008 with FORTRAN 77 code that is also provided.

Keywords

• spherical harmonic expansion
• gravimetric quantities
• exact computation