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DTIC ADA063887: The Operational Approach to Physical Geodesy.

The operational approach to physical geodesy starts from the measurements and asks how they can be used in the best way to determine the earth's figure and gravitational field. All measurements can be represented as nonlinear functionals of the potential and of systematic parameters such as station coordinates. After linearization we obtain an improperly posed problem, to which three standard methods of solving such problems are applied: a change in the solution space, a variational principle according to Tichonov, and a statistical approach. All three approaches seem to converge on collocation with kernel functions and least-squares collocation. Some alternatives are also discussed. (Author)

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