Journal of Emerging Trends in Engineering and Applied Sciences: Research Areas

Abstract:
Contour map serves a lot of purposes to the map users as it's depict the three dimensional configuration of the area under study. Data acquisition for the production of such maps has been tedious, expensive and time consuming. There is need for simple and quick method of producing these maps. "Satlevel" Collocation is a method of geoid determination in which the ellipsoidal height from any satellite based system is combined with orthometric height from geodetic levelling to model the geoid. Geoid determinations using integration of geodetic levelling and Global Navigation Satellite System (GNSS), which enables the geoid to be determined in patches, are taking over from the empirical geoid determination. Geoid so determined can be applied with ellipsoidal height to get orthometric height which height users always prefer. The Orthometric height can then be used for production of contour map. In this work, "Satlevel" Collocation model along with the user's interactive computer program "Orthometric Height on Fly", were used to generate orthometric heights in Yanbu Industrial city. The generated data was used to produce the contour map of the study area using SURFER software. This method enables production of contour map from "Satlevel" Collocation predicted orthometric height from GNSS observations without going through all the processes of data acquisition by levelling, when the initial geoidal coefficients have been determined. There is no significant difference between the new map and the one from the acquired data. This method can be extended to other parts of Saudi Arabia and the world at large.

Keywords: contour map, geoid, "satlevel" Collocation and SURFER.

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