It is well known that the most accurate method to detect changes of height is the geodetic precise leveling method. Due to the high demand work and time needed for precise leveling alternative methods are studied to obtain high quality height information. Differential SAR interferometry techniques such as the Persistent Scatterer Interferometry (PSI) method are studied to detect millimeter leve...

Closely spaced satellite altimeter profiles collected during the Geosat Geodetic Mission (-6 km) and the ERS 1 Geodetic Phase (8 km) are easily converted to grids of vertical gravity gradient and gravity anomaly. The long-wavelength radial orbit error is suppressed below the noise level of the altimeter by taking the along-track derivative of each profile. Ascending and descending slope profile...

Effective satellite mission operations are directly impacted by the ability to generate accurate and precise orbit predictions. High precision orbit determination processes rely on detailed force models to propagate an orbit solution and predict future orbit behavior. While gravity forces are typically well understood, the modeling of non-conservative forces is often more challenging, causing i...

During 1996–2006, the Ministry of Agriculture and Forestry in Finland (MAFF), MTT Agrifood Research and the Finnish Geodetic Institute performed a joint remote sensing satellite research project. It evaluated the applicability of optical satellite (Landsat, SPOT) data for cereal yield estimations in the annual crop inventory program. Four Optical Vegetation Indices models (I: Infrared polynomia...

From flat Earth, to round Earth, to a rough and oblate Earth, people's understanding of the shape of our planet and its landscapes has changed dramatically over the course of history. These advances in geodesy— the study of Earth's size, shape, orientation, and gravitational field, and the variations of these quantities over time—developed because of humans' curiosity about the Earth and becaus...

W e consider the rational linear relations between real numbers whose squared trigonometric functions have rational values, angles we call “geodetic.” We construct a convenient basis for the vector space over generated by these angles. Geodetic angles and rational linear combinations of geodetic angles appear naturally in Euclidean geometry; for illustration we apply our results to equidecompos...

Geodetic Global Navigation Satellite System reflectometry (GNSS-R) uses ground-based signals of opportunity to retrieve sea levels at an intermediate spatial scale. GNSS-R is based on the simultaneous reception Line-of-Sight (LoS) and its coherent GNSS surface reflection (non-LOS) signals. The scope this paper present geodetic applied level altimetry. Signal-to-Noise Ratio (SNR) measurements fr...

Airborne and satellite remote sensing is the only practical approach for deriving a wide area, regional assessment of glacier mass balance. A number of remote sensing approaches are possible for inferring the mass balance from some sort of proxy estimate. Here, we review the key methods relevant, in particular to Andean glaciers, discussing their strengths and weaknesses, and data sets that cou...

Successful satellite operations often depend on the ability to precisely determine the satellite’s position throughout it’s operational lifetime. Often, simplified models are used to reduce the computational complexity when producing an orbit determination solution. One example is the use of lower order gravitational terms when computing the state transition matrix. The US Naval Research Labora...