ICGEM – International Centre for Global Earth Models

Overview

The determination of Earth’s global gravity field is one of the main tasks of geodesy: it serves as a reference for geodesy itself and provides essential information about the Earth, its interior and its fluid envelope for all geosciences. Thus, it is important to model the gravity field globally and make the state-of-the-art models available to public as geodetic products. With accurate satellite measurements, it is now possible to map the static gravity field as well as its variations with much higher spatial and temporal resolutions compared to the first of its kinds. The list of such models is continuously growing and requires dedicated maintenance.
International Centre for Global Earth Models (ICGEM) is one of the five services coordinated by the International Gravity Field Service (IGFS) of the International Association of Geodesy (IAG). The primary objective of the ICGEM service is to collect and archive all existing static and temporal global gravity field models and provide an online interactive calculation service for the computation of gravity field functionals freely available to the general public. The calculation of the different functionals of the geopotential (e.g. geoid, gravity anomaly, gravity disturbance, equivalent water height) from a defined global model, on a specified grid or points with respect to a defined reference system, is not trivial for science and scientists and is a responsibility of geodesy too. Additionally, it is important to visualize the spatial and temporal distribution of the global gravity field and therefore interactive visualization is also provided by ICGEM.

Objectives

With the initiation of IGFS and the commitment for hosting and financial support by German Research Centre for Geosciences (GFZ), the ICGEM service was established in 2003 and comprehends: – collecting and long-term archiving of existing static global gravity field models, solutions from dedicated shorter time periods, and topographic gravity field models, – making the above-mentioned models available on the web in a standardized format as described in Barthelmes and Förste (2011), – assigning Digital Object Identifiers (DOIs) to the models, – a web interface for the calculation of gravity field functionals from the spherical harmonic models on freely selectable grids and user-defined points, – a 3-D interactive visualization of the models (geoid undulations and gravity anomalies), – quality checks of the static gravity field models via comparisons with other models in the spectral domain and w. r. t. GNSS/levelling-derived geoid undulations, – the visualization of surface spherical harmonics as tutorial, – the theory and formulas of the calculation service documented in GFZ’s Scientific Technical Report STR09/02 (Barthelmes, 2013), – manuals and tutorials for global gravity field modelling and usage of the service (Barthelmes, 2014) and scientific journal papers for educational and reference purposes (Ince et al 樱花视频在线. 2019) and finally, – the ICGEM web-based gravity field discussion forum for questions on ICGEM, its products, and knowledge exchange.

Services

The Models

Static gravity field models, models from dedicated time periods, and topographic gravity field models of the Earth and gravity field models of other celestial bodies and since recently simulated gravity field models for new generation gravity missions are available in the form of spherical harmonic coefficients.

Digital Object Identifiers (DOI)

To support open science and citable data, ICGEM assigns DOIs together with the GFZ Library and Information Services. DOI # requests can be made via: http://pmd 樱花视频免费观看. gfz-potsdam. de/panmetaworks/metaedit/.

The 3D Visualization

An online interactive service for the visualization of the models (in terms of height anomalies and gravity anomalies) as illuminated projection on a freely rotatable sphere shown in Fig. 1 is available (http://icgem 樱花视频网站. gfz-potsdam. de/vis3d/longtime).