The GPS positioning is widely used for Geo-informatics related applications especially in GIS. Besides that it is being used in Airborne Laser Scanning, Remote Sensing and Photogrammeric tasks where 3D coordinates are essential. In most of applications the orthometric heights are preferred than the ellipsoidal heights directly given by the GPS receiver. Orthometric heights can be derived accurately from GPS heights by using a well refined (regional) geoid model at the accuracy of centimeter level. At present the Earth Gravitational Models (EGMs) have been used for various applications in Geodesy. EGM2008 is a combined high resolution EGM (Degree 2160) derived with satellite and terrestrial gravity, elevation and altimetric data by the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA) of the USA which has the minimum wavelength of ~10 km at the equator. This is a remarkable step compare to its predecessor EGM96 (Degree 360) whose minimum was ~110 km at the equator. The new model can be used to get more accurate solutions basically in determining orthometric heights from GPS measurements.

This paper addresses the potential of using EGM2008 for applications in geo-informatics in Sri Lanka where showing the standard deviation of ±0.184 m in the height anomaly over 204 benchmarks throughout the island while having a -1.760m bias between the GPS-levelling and the EGM2008 .This technique would be one of the alternatives which could be applied to derive heights directly from GPS measurements for geo-informatics applications for the countries where well prepared geoid models are not available.