The Geoid

  • Released Wednesday, July 15, 2026
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The geoid is an equipotential surface that can be thought of as the shape an ocean surface would take due to the Earth's gravity field. The geoid height ranges from +85 m (Iceland) to −106 m (southern India). In this visualization the geoid height is greatly exaggerated, by a factor of 10,000. The geoid height visualized here comes from the gravity field model GOCO06s, a satellite-only global gravity field model computed by the GOCO (Gravity Observation Combination) project. It is based on over a billion observations acquired over 15 years from 19 satellites. These satellites include NASA's Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment (GRACE) and ESA's Gravity field and steady-state Ocean Circulation Explorer (GOCE).

Geoid 3D Model

This is an interactive 3D model! Swipe with one finger to rotate the model. Swipe with two fingers to pan the model instead.
This is an interactive 3D model! Click and drag or use the arrow keys to rotate the model. Hold shift to pan the model instead.

A 3D model of the Geoid, with the geoid height exaggerated by a factor of 10,000.

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Missions

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Related papers

GOCO06s – a satellite-only global gravity field model

Kvas, A., Brockmann, J. M., Krauss, S., Schubert, T., Gruber, T., Meyer, U., Mayer-Gürr, T., Schuh, W.-D., Jäggi, A., and Pail, R.: GOCO06s – a satellite-only global gravity field model, Earth Syst. Sci. Data, 13, 99–118, https://doi.org/10.5194/essd-13-99-2021, 2021.

DOI: https://doi.org/10.5194/essd-13-99-2021

This paper can be found at: https://essd.copernicus.org/articles/13/99/2021/

Datasets used

Note: While we identify the data sets used on this page, we do not store any further details, nor the data sets themselves on our site.

This page was originally published on Wednesday, July 15, 2026.
This page was last updated on Wednesday, July 15, 2026 at 10:52 AM EDT.