Ability of the EGM2008 high degree geopotential model to calculate a local geoid model in Valencia, Eastern Spain

A new generation of global geopotential models (GGM) is being developed. These solutions offer a file with fully-normalized spherical harmonic coefficients of the Earth’s gravitational potential up to a degree greater than 2000 with very low commission errors. This paper analyses the recent Earth Gravitational Model EGM2008, developed up to degree and order 2159 with additional coefficients to degree 2190 and order 2159, which means recovering the gravitational field up to approximately 20 km wavelengths. 223 GPS/levelling points of the new Spanish High Precision Levelling Network in the Valencia region (Eastern Spain) are used as external tool for evaluation in that particular region. The same evaluation has been performed to other different global (EGM96 and EIGENCG03C), continental (EGG97), regional (IGG2005 and IBERGEO2006) and local (GCV07) geoid models for comparison purposes only. These comparisons show that EGM2008 is the geoid model that best fits to the GPS/levelling data in that region.