and Residual undulation NRES using
Stokes` integral is little complicated
and required to be discussed in detail.
Terrain correction
Computation of NRTM is done relative
to the mean elevation surface (fig.6)
In case of remove – compute – restore
technique, substracting the contribution
of reference global geopotential model
from the local terrestrial gravity data
also include the effects of the global
topography ; therefore substraction
of further topographic effect may
introduce long wave length effects
into the residual potential. To avoid
this only short wavelengths of the
topographic effect may be used, which
is termed as residual terrain model
(RTM) effect(Forseberg,R,1994) . The
RTM terrain effect may be computed in
a spherical cap around the computation
point, provided the cap is sufficiently
large so that the remote residual
topography has a negligible effect.
In this study the mean elevation
surface was determined from the DEM
data by applying the moving average
method. The RTM gravity terrain
effect in the planner approximation
given by a volume integral:
(3)
Where h are the heights of topography,
G is the gravitational constant andρ is the mass density taken as 2.67
gm/cm3 in the computation. The
computations of ΔgRTM were done
in space domain prism integration
by Fast Fourier Transform (FFT) method using the dense height data.
Modifi cation of kernel
Modifi cation of Kernel S (ψ) in Stokes`
formula forms an important part of
geoid determination process due to the
fact that long wave-length systematic
errors in gravity data can produce
large geoid errors. These systematic
errors can be avoided by modifying
the classical Stokes` Kernel in an
appropriate manner. There are different
ways of modifi cations, however in
our study we used the modifi cation
suggested by Wong and Gore (1996).
As per the technique the spheroidal
Stokes’ kernel S(ψ) in equation
(1), which is implicit to the Stokes’
formula, can be modifi ed simply by
removing the appropriate-degree
Legendre polynomials [Pn(cosψ)]
from the closed form of the
spherical Stokes’ Kernel (Eqn.2).

(4)
Where is the spherical distance
between the computation point and
integration points. We may choose
any degree of modifi cation to our
choice which permits the ultimate
geoid to best fi t the GPS-Levelling
undulations. At the same time the
modifi cation approach should be
applied in combination with capsize
radius ψ = ψm as both the reference
geoid EGM96 as well as local gravity
data may have errors and therefore
the difference between the two geoids
i.e. gravimetric and GPS-Levelling
with different degrees of modifi cations
does not necessarily equal to zero.
Thus kernel modifi cation and capsize
assumptions provide the means of
optimising the solution of Stokes`
integral in determination of local geoid.
Geoid model construction
For computation of geoid the degree
of Kernel modifi cation in Eqn. (4)
was chosen to be m=360, which
is same as the degree of reference
global geopotential model EGM96.
Eqn. (1) when applied over a
limited spherical cap of radius
(ψ°=0.5°) about each computation
point leads to the following
approximation of geoid height

(5)
The concept of spherical cap of
limited spatial extent in analytical
solutions of Stokes’ integration was
implemented simply by setting the
value of to zero out side the cap
region. The fi nal geoid was constructed
based on the methodology described
in section 3. The reduced gravity data
was arranged in a grid using Least
Squares collocation (LSC) technique.
Geoidal heights were computed by
applying the generalized Stokes’
scheme(Eqn. 5) using spherical
cap of radius 0.5°. NRTM was
computed by planar approximation
implemented using FFT technique
on the 0.5 Km basic resolution grid.
Finally, NEGM96 was added to
NRES and NRTM to obtain the final
geoid (Fig. 4(b)). Table 1 below
shows the statistics of the various
component computed at the different
stages of the model construction
Looking at the table-1 the effect of
Residual terrain model (NRTM) is
almost negligible and only shortwave
residual gravity anomalies contributes
to reference geoid i.e. EGM96.
However the effect, as evident from
the table-1 is order of 35-55 cm which
is a minor quantity in comparison
to the total geoidal undulation (≈-
53 m). Thus EGM96 geoid is very
smooth in the region and almost fit
in to the local geoid having only the
minor short wave length variations.