Franck Reinquin (CNES, France); Philippe Schaeffer (CLS, France)

Marine gravity data collected with gravimeters on ships, while not available for large parts of the Mediterranean, is used in the assessment of altimeter-inferred gravity anomalies, such as the known DTU and UCSD models as well as our first model of the Mediterranean. The marine gravity data we used was compiled and calibrated for the GEOMED2 project. The aim of that project, which started in 2014, was the calculation of high-resolution geoids of the Mediterranean using different methodologies. One interesting and surprising result of the project was that the ship gravity data, even the data from the sixties and seventies after calibration, is more accurate than DTU15 or UCSD v24 and is therefore suitable for model assessment.
In this analysis, we compared the different altimeter-inferred gravity anomaly models between themselves, and to the ship gravity anomaly data.