Geopotential

This article relies largely or entirely on a single source. Relevant discussion may be found on the talk page. Please help improve this article by introducing citations to additional sources. Find sources: "Geopotential" – news · newspapers · books · scholar · JSTOR (July 2014)

Geopotential is the potential of the Earth's gravity field. For convenience it is often defined as the negative of the potential energy per unit mass, so that the gravity vector is obtained as the gradient of the geopotential, without the negation. In addition to the actual potential (the geopotential), a theoretical normal potential and their difference, the disturbing potential, can also be defined.