Exploitation of Marine Gravity Measurements of the Mediterranean in the Validation of Global Gravity Field Models

Over the oceans, data from altimetry are currently the only input data for the latest global geoid models such as EGM08 or EIGEN6C. Over the Mediterranean sea, satellite altimetry does not give good results for gravity models. In particular because of the high ocean variability and in the vicinity of the coast in some areas. A marine gravity data compilation and screening was conducted as part of an international project GEOMED2 for calculating the geoid of the Mediterranean sea. In this paper, marine gravity data and their processing are described. The shipborne gravity data are validated and an estimation of the error is done. Then the cleaned data are used to validate the Global Geoid models (GGm).