Recent advances in the determination of a high spatial resolution geopotential model using chronometric geodesy

This work aims to evaluate the contribution of optical atomic clocks in the determination of the geopotential at high spatial resolution. The quality of the geopotential reconstruction is evaluated by comparing solutions computed from synthetic gravimetric data, combined or not with synthetic clock data. Our synthetic tests are performed in a French area with a moderate relief, which leads to variations of the gravitational field over a range of spatial scales. We show that adding few clock data into a gravimetric network permits to reduce the reconstruction bias significantly and to improve the standard deviation by a factor 3. Optimization of a clock data network with a genetic algorithm is also investigated.