Numerical aspects of EGM08-based geoid computations in Fennoscandia regarding the applied reference surface and error propagation

So far the recent Earth's gravity model, EGM08, has been successfully applied for different geophysical and geodetic purposes. In this paper, we show that the computation of geoid and gravity anomaly on the reference ellipsoid is of essential importance but error propagation of EGM08 on this surface is not successful due to downward continuation of the errors. Also we illustrate that some artefacts appear in the computed geoid and gravity anomaly to lower degree and order than 2190. This means that the role of higher degree harmonics than 2160 is to remove these artefacts from the results. Consequently, EGM08 must be always used to degree and order 2190 to avoid the numerical problems.