Improving modified Stokes' formula by GOCE data

Dedicated satellite gravity missions, such as GOCE, will substantially increase the quality in geoid modelling. As these data are expected to be highly accurate, homogeneous and without the biases and other systematic defects of current terrestrial data, it seems advantageous to compute the geoid model by the modified Stokes' formula with a GOCE-only low-degree geoid representation. Such a model is optimised in a least squares sense. As an alternative, a previous geoid solution, based on the modified Stokes'formula, is combined with GOCE data in an optimum way.