A Flight Test of the Strapdown Airborne Gravimeter SGA-WZ in Greenland

• Published in: Sensors
• Main Authors: Zhao, Lei, Forsberg, René, Wu, Meiping, Olesen, Arne Vestergaard, Zhang, Kaidong, Cao, Juliang
• Format: Text
• Language: English
• Published: MDPI 2015
• Subjects: Article; Greenland
• Online Access: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4507644/; http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/26057039; https://doi.org/10.3390/s150613258

An airborne gravimeter is one of the most important tools for gravity data collection over large areas with mGal accuracy and a spatial resolution of several kilometers. In August 2012, a flight test was carried out to determine the feasibility and to assess the accuracy of the new Chinese SGA-WZ strapdown airborne gravimeter in Greenland, in an area with good gravity coverage from earlier marine and airborne surveys. An overview of this new system SGA-WZ is given, including system design, sensor performance and data processing. The processing of the SGA-WZ includes a 160 s length finite impulse response filter, corresponding to a spatial resolution of 6 km. For the primary repeated line, a mean r.m.s. deviation of the differences was less than 1.5 mGal, with the error estimate confirmed from ground truth data. This implies that the SGA-WZ could meet standard geophysical survey requirements at the 1 mGal level.