Note
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Earth Geoid¶
The geoid is the equipotential surface of the Earth’s gravity potential that coincides with mean sea level. It’s often represented by “geoid heights”, which indicate the height of the geoid relative to the reference ellipsoid (WGS84 in this case). Negative values indicate that the geoid is below the ellipsoid surface and positive values that it is above. The data are on a regular grid with 0.5 degree spacing and was generated from the spherical harmonic model EIGEN-6C4 [Forste_etal2014].
Out:
<xarray.Dataset>
Dimensions: (latitude: 361, longitude: 721)
Coordinates:
* longitude (longitude) float64 -180.0 -179.5 -179.0 ... 179.0 179.5 180.0
* latitude (latitude) float64 -90.0 -89.5 -89.0 -88.5 ... 89.0 89.5 90.0
Data variables:
geoid (latitude, longitude) float64 -29.5 -29.5 -29.5 ... 15.37 15.37
Attributes: (12/37)
generating_institute: gfz-potsdam
generating_date: 2018/12/13
product_type: gravity_field
body: earth
modelname: EIGEN-6C4
max_used_degree: 1277
... ...
maxvalue: 8.4722744E+01 meter
minvalue: -1.0625734E+02 meter
signal_wrms: 3.0584191E+01 meter
grid_format: long_lat_value
attributes: longitude latitude geoid
attributes_units: deg. deg. meter
import cartopy.crs as ccrs
import matplotlib.pyplot as plt
import harmonica as hm
# Load the geoid grid
data = hm.datasets.fetch_geoid_earth()
print(data)
# Make a plot of data using Cartopy
plt.figure(figsize=(10, 10))
ax = plt.axes(projection=ccrs.Orthographic(central_longitude=100))
pc = data.geoid.plot.pcolormesh(ax=ax, transform=ccrs.PlateCarree(), add_colorbar=False)
plt.colorbar(
pc, label="meters", orientation="horizontal", aspect=50, pad=0.01, shrink=0.6
)
ax.set_title("Geoid heights (EIGEN-6C4)")
ax.coastlines()
plt.show()
Total running time of the script: ( 0 minutes 0.576 seconds)