Spatial resolution of airborne gravity estimates in Kalman filtering

Abstract Airborne gravimetry is an efficient and reliable method to obtain information on the gravity field, fundamental to gravity field modelling, geoid determination, and flood risk mapping. In evaluation and utilization of gravity estimates, two measures are of fundamental importance, namely the accuracy and spatial resolution. These measures are related to one another through the filtering required to suppress observational noise. As strapdown inertial measurement units (IMUs) are increasingly deployed for airborne gravity surveys, the Kalman filter estimation method is routinely used for gravity determination. Since filtering is not applied directly to the observations in Kalman filtering, it is not straightforward to associate the derived gravity estimates with a measure of spatial resolution. This investigation presents a method for deriving spatial resolution by evaluating the transfer function formed after applying a delta function to the observed accelerations. The method is applied to Kalman-filter-derived gravity estimates from an airborne strapdown IMU system, yielding a full-wavelength spatial resolution of 5.5 km at an accuracy of 0.6 mGal. These results are consistent with a comparison with upward continued terrestrial gravity observations.