Fernando Sansò – författare

This volume gathers the proceedings of the IX Hotine-Marussi Symposium on Mathematical Geodesy, which was held from 18 to 22 June 2018 at the Faculty of Civil and Industrial Engineering, Sapienza University of Rome, Italy. Since 2006, the Hotine-Marussi Symposia series has been produced under the auspices of the Inter-Commission Committee on Theory (ICCT) within the International Association of Geodesy (IAG). The ICCT has organized the last four Hotine-Marussi Symposia, held in Wuhan (2006) and Rome (2009, 2013 and 2018). The overall goal of the ICCT and Hotine-Marussi Symposia has always been to advance geodetic theory, as reflected in the 25 peer-reviewed research articles presented here.

The IX Hotine-Marussi Symposium was divided into 10 topical sessions covering all aspects of geodetic theory including reference frames, gravity field modelling, adjustment theory, atmosphere, time series analysis and advanced numerical methods. In total 118 participants attended the Symposium and delivered 82 oral and 37 poster presentations. During a special session at the Accademia Nazionale deiLincei, the oldest scientific academy in the world, six invited speakers discussed interactions of geodesy with oceanography, glaciology, atmospheric research, mathematics, Earth science and seismology.

This book investigates the relationship between empirical reality and theoretical modelling in Earth sciences, focusing on how empirical experiments and theoretical models interact. It explores the connection between statistics and probability theory, emphasizing the importance of these tools in understanding the physical world. The first chapter addresses the frequency-probability antinomy, while the second chapter discusses the sources of randomness in modelling. Chapters 3 and 4 delve into statistical inference, covering estimation theory and testing theory. Chapter 5 examines the relationship between discrete-finite models and continuous-infinite dimensional models, particularly random fields, making the concepts accessible to geodesists and geophysicists. Chapter 6 explores modern machine learning and deep learning, highlighting their roots in traditional statistical methods and neural networks. The book concludes with a caution against relying solely on empirical evidence and "black box" algorithms, advocating for the integration of physical laws with empirical models to advance understanding of the physical world.

The book is primarily intended for graduate students and researchers in the field of earth sciences with a basic background in probability theory and statistics.

This book offers a new approach to interpreting the geodetic boundary value problem, successfully obtaining the solutions of the Molodensky and Stokes boundary value problems (BVPs) with the help of downward continuation (DC) based methods. Although DC is known to be an improperly posed operation, classical methods seem to provide numerically sensible results, and therefore it can be concluded that such classical methods must in fact be manifestations of different, mathematically sound approaches.

Here, the authors first prove the equivalence of Molodensky’s and Stoke''s approaches with Helmert’s reduction in terms of both BVP formulation and BVP solutions by means of the DC method. They then go on to show that this is not merely a downward continuation operation, and provide more rigorous interpretations of the DC approach as a change of boundary approach and as a pseudo BVP solution approach.

Geodesy is the science dealing with the determination of the position of points in space, the shape and gravity field of the Earth and with their time variations. A consequence is that geodesists feel as a permanent subject of research, the detection, analysis and interpretation of spatial deformation as well as gravity field variation. This book collects 36 selected papers from the International Symposium on Geodetic Deformation Monitoring held in Jaén (Spain) from 17th to 19th March 2005. The main topics covered in the symposium were: mathematical and statistical models for crustal deformation analysis, deformation monitoring from GPS and InSAR data: analysis and geophysical interpretation, geodetic monitoring of movements in civil engineering, integration of spatial and terrestrial techniques in deformation studies, geodynamical applications of gravimetric observations and present-day geodetic instrumentation for deformation monitoring. This volume is a good overview of theoretical matters, models and results.