A practical software package for computing gravimetric geoid by the least squares modification of Hotine’s formula

Today’s geodetic community starts to model an accurate gravimetric geoid within a 5 mm level, which entirely meets the demands of all technical and geoscientific studies. In this context, a wide range of geoid modelling methods have been published through the years, each of them has its own philosophy. Recently, a new geoid modelling technique has been developed by using the least squares modification of Hotine’s formula (LSMH), which gives more reasonable results than other methods. However, a practical and compact software package is not publicly accessible for researchers in this method. Thus, a scientific software package named “LSMHSOFT” is developed by C programming language and made available for public use in this study. Subsequently, the software is employed for the composition of gravimetric geoid in the Auvergne test-bed, verifying it by GNSS (Global Navigation Satellite Systems)-levelling data. Numerical results indicate that LSMHSOFT is a powerful tool for modelling gravimetric geoid by the least squares modification of Hotine’s formula and its additive corrections.