Badania słojów drzew są z powodzeniem prowadzone od XVIII w. Obecnie dostarczają informacji dotyczących zmian klimatycznych, szczególne zmian wilgotności i temperatury, jakie miały miejsce w ostatnim tysiącleciu.

Scholars have been studying tree rings since the eighteenth century. Today, growth-ring patterns provide us with information on climate changes over the last millennium, particularly on variation in temperature and humidity.

The GRACE-based model GGM02S is a global gravity model expressed in spherical harmonics. As the model is a global solution, a certain smoothing of the available gravity field information is unavoidable. For regional geoid determination the irregularities of residual gravity field should be included. The paper presents the global GRACE gravity field solution, regionally improved by adding a residual field, which is represented by radial base functions. The GRACE observations over the territory of Poland are analysed and a regionally improved GRACE geoid from this data is derived. This improved regional geoid is compared with the Polish quasigeoid and differences between the global and regionally improved GRACE GGM02S solutions are discussed. The study shows that the error of the official GRACE GGM02s solution was reduced by 50% due 10 regional refinement.

An increased use of global navigation techniques for positioning, and in particular for height determination, led to a growing need for precise models of height reference surface, i.e. geoid or quasigeoid. Geoid or quasigeoid heights at a cm accuracy level, provided on growing number ofGPS/levelling sites, can not only be used for quality control of gravimetric geoid but they also can be integrated with gravity data for geoid/quasigeoid modelling. Such a model is of particular use for surveying practice. A method of quasigeoid modelling based on GPS/levelling data with support of geopotential model and gravity data was developed. The components of height anomaly are modelled with the deterministic part that consists of height anomaly based on EGM96 geopotential model and Molodensky's integral, as well as the polynomial representing trend, and from the stochastic part represented by the isotropic covariance function. Model parameters, i.e. polynomial coefficients and covariance function parameters are determined in a single process of robust estimation, resistant to the outlying measurements. The method was verified using almost a thousand height anomalies from the sites of the EUREF-POL, POLREF, EUVN'97 and WSSG (Military Satellite Geodetic Network) networks in Poland as well as geopotential model refined with gravity data in l' x l' grid. The estimated average mean square error of quasigeoid height is at the level of O.Ol m. The outlying measurements were efficiently detected.