Regional gravity field modeling using airborne gravimetry data

Regional gravity field modeling using airborne gravimetry data Bas Alberts Publications on Geodesy 70 Acknowledgments Many years ago someone mentioned to me, 'Isn't it great that gravity can be measured in such a dynamic environment as aboard an aircraft?'. This caught my attention, and since then I have been working on various projects related to airborne gravimetry, finally resulting in this PhD thesis. I can now confirm that measuring gravity aboard an aircraft is a great feat indeed. A book on this topic and the research it represents cannot be completed successfully without the support from a large number of people. Foremost, I would like to thank Roland Klees for his supervision and guidance during my PhD. It is impossible not to get affected by his enthusiasm and both his encouragement and expertise have helped me very much in completing this work. Many thanks go to Pavel Ditmar, whose feedback, resourcefulness and creativity contributed greatly to my work. I consider myself very lucky having had two supervisors who were always willing to listen and give valuable advice. I especially appreciated the weekly meetings with both of them, which were the source of many good ideas and fruitful discussions. Furthermore, I thank all my (former) colleagues at DEOS and especially the PSG group for their support and for providing an enjoyable working environment. Special thanks go to Jasper van Loon, with whom it has been a pleasure sharing an office throughout the past seven years. I really enjoyed the discussions which ranged from work to soccer, but also the trips to conferences in Europe and Australia. I also thank everyone involved in the GAIN project, especially Brian Gunter for his support and discussions on strap-down airborne gravimetry. I hope the GAIN project will be very successful and many test flights will be performed in the near future. I thank Relly van Wingaarden and Fiona Tuynman for the administrative support. I am grateful to GFZ Potsdam for providing the airborne gravity data of the AGMASCO and CHICAGO campaigns. I thank Jürgen Neumayer of GFZ and Uwe Meyer of BGR for explaining the airborne gravity pre-processing sofware (AGS) to me and Guochang Xu of GFZ for his help with GPS data processing. I appreciate the willingness of my two paranymphs Freek van Leijen and Luc Alberts to read the manuscript, which helped reduce the number of remaining errors significantly. Thanks to all my …