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The geoid is often expressed as a geoid undulation or geoidal height above a given reference ellipsoid, which is a slightly flattened sphere whose equatorial bulge is caused by the planet's rotation. Generally the geoidal height rises where the Earth's material is locally more dense and exerts greater gravitational force than the surrounding areas.
The reference surface is the geoid, an equigeopotential surface approximating the mean sea level as described above. For normal heights, the reference surface is the so-called quasi-geoid, which has a few-metre separation from the geoid due to the density assumption in its continuation under the continental masses. [11]
Modern geodesy tends to retain the ellipsoid of revolution as a reference ellipsoid and treat triaxiality and pear shape as a part of the geoid figure: they are represented by the spherical harmonic coefficients , and , respectively, corresponding to degree and order numbers 2.2 for the triaxiality and 3.0 for the pear shape.
The geometrical separation between it and the reference ellipsoid is called the geoidal undulation, or more usually the geoid-ellipsoid separation, N. It varies globally between ±110 m. A reference ellipsoid, customarily chosen to be the same size (volume) as the geoid, is described by its semi-major axis (equatorial radius) a and flattening f.
The function getEGMGeoidHeight can be used to evaluate the geoid height under the EGM96 and EGM2008 models. Additionally, the gravitational potential, acceleration, and gravity gradient (second spatial derivatives of the potential) can be evaluated using the spherHarmonicEval function, as demonstrated in DemoGravCode .
For example, at a radius of 6600 km (about 200 km above Earth's surface) J 3 /(J 2 r) is about 0.002; i.e., the correction to the "J 2 force" from the "J 3 term" is in the order of 2 permille. The negative value of J 3 implies that for a point mass in Earth's equatorial plane the gravitational force is tilted slightly towards the south due to ...
It is then possible to compute the geoid height by subtracting the measured altitude from the ellipsoidal height. This allows direct measurement of the geoid, since the ocean surface closely follows the geoid. [3]: 64 The difference between the ocean surface and the actual geoid gives ocean surface topography.
Molecular biology allows scientists to understand a gene's function using microbial culturing and mutagenesis. Searching for similar genes in other organisms and in metagenomic and metatranscriptomic data allows us to understand what processes could be relevant and important in a given ecosystem, providing insight into the biogeochemical cycles ...