co-chairs:      S. Kenyon (kenyons@nga.mil)
                P. Knudsen (pk@kms.dk)

Recent satellite missions such as the Shuttle Radar Topographic Mission (SRTM) and ICESAT have collected vast new sources of topographic information for the Earth. Our bathymetric knowledge of the oceans has steadily improved by dedicated marine surveys and models derived from satellite altimetry. New approaches in modeling the topography and bathymetry of the Earth to support future Earth gravity and geoid models are currently being researched. Topographic effects are one of the important reductions in gravity modeling and in some cases will be the only information available to model the gravity field. Efforts to better define the variability of the Earth's density can be used to calculate more accurate topographic effects for improved high-resolution geoid modeling. Forward modeling of local, regional, and global gravity fields using topographic data and mass densities is also an important component in better understanding the Earth's gravity field. This session solicits papers on the collection and modeling of new topographic and bathymetric data, gravity modeling from digital elevation models, variable density modeling and terrain reductions for high resolution geoids, forward modeling of gravity, and other related topics on Earth data analysis that help us understand the accuracy of the topographic databases and how they contribute to modeling the Earth's gravity field.