FFT-Evaluation and applications of gravity-field convolution integrals with mean and point data

Abstract

Due to the fact that the spectrum of a convolution is the product of the spectra of the two convolved functions, the convolution integrals of physical geodesy can be evaluated very efficiently by the use of the fast Fourier transform (FFT) provided that gravity and/or terrain data are available on a regular grid. All Fourier transform-based methods usually treat the gridded data as point values despite the fact that these discrete values may have been obtained by averaging and they represent mean values over the whole area of a grid element. In the frequency domain, this fact can be taken into account very easily, because the spectra of mean and point data are related via a two-dimensional (2D) sinc function. The paper shows explicitly this relationship using the convolution integrals for the evaluation of geoid undulations, deflections of the vertical, and gravity and gradiometry terrain effects. Numerical tests are presented, indicating that the differences in the two approaches may become significant when highly accurate results are wanted. The application of the2D sinc function in the evaluation, update, and inversion of other convolution integrals is briefly discussed as well.