Inertial navigation systems and gravimeters are now routinely used to map the regional gravitational quantities from an aircraft with mGal accuracy and a spatial resolution of a few kilometers. However, airborne gravimeter of this kind is limited by the inaccuracy of the inertial sensor performance, the integrated navigation technique and the kinematic acceleration determination. As the GPS technique developed, the vehicle acceleration determination is no longer the limiting factor in airborne gravity due to the cancellation of the common mode acceleration in differential mode. A new airborne gravimeter taking full advantage of the inertial navigation system is described with improved mechanical design, high precision time synchronization, better thermal control and optimized sensor modeling. Apart from the general usage, the Global Positioning System (GPS) after differentiation is integrated to the inertial navigation system which provides not only more precise altitude information along with the navigation aiding, but also an effective way to calculate the vehicle acceleration. Design description and test results on the performance of the gyroscopes and accelerations will be emphasized. Analysis and discussion of the airborne field test results are also given.

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.

Surveying the Earth’s gravity field refers to an important domain of Geodesy, involving deep connections with Earth Sciences and Geo-information. Airborne gravimetry is an effective tool for collecting gravity data with mGal accuracy and a spatial resolution of several kilometers. The main obstacle of airborne gravimetry is extracting gravity disturbance from the extremely low signal to noise ratio measuring data. In general, the power of noise concentrates on the higher frequency of measuring data, and a low pass filter can be used to eliminate it. However, the noise could distribute in a broad range of frequency while low pass filter cannot deal with it in pass band of the low pass filter. In order to improve the accuracy of the airborne gravimetry, Empirical Mode Decomposition (EMD) is employed to denoise the measuring data of two primary repeated flights of the strapdown airborne gravimetry system SGA-WZ carried out in Greenland. Comparing to the solutions of using finite impulse response filter (FIR), the new results are improved by 40% and 10% of root mean square (RMS) of internal consistency and external accuracy, respectively.