American Geophysical Union, Geophysical Research Letters, 16(40), p. 4279-4283, 2013
DOI: 10.1002/grl.50838
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We provide an unprecedented ultra-high resolution picture of Earth's gravity over all continents and numerous islands within ± 60 degree latitude. This is achieved through augmentation of new satellite and terrestrial gravity with topography data, and use of massive parallel computation techniques, delivering local detail at ~200 m spatial resolution. As such, our work is the first-of-its-kind to model gravity at unprecedented fine scales yet with near-global coverage. The new picture of Earth's gravity encompasses a suite of gridded estimates of gravity accelerations, radial and horizontal field components and quasigeoid heights at over 3 billion points covering 80% of Earth's land masses. We identify new candidate locations of extreme gravity signals, suggesting that the CODATA standard for peak-to-peak variations in free-fall gravity is too low by about 40%. The new models are beneficial for a wide range of scientific and engineering applications and freely available to the public.