Static and temporal gravity field recovery using grace potential difference observables

Abstract. The gravity field dedicated satellite missions like CHAMP, GRACE, and GOCE are supposed to map the Earth’s global gravity field with unprecedented accuracy and resolution. New models of Earth’s static and time-variable gravity field will be available every month as one of the science products from GRACE. Here we present an alternative method to estimate the gravity field efficiently using the in situ satellite-to-satellite observations at the altitude and show results on static as well as temporal gravity field recovery. Considering the energy relation between the kinetic energy of the satellite and the gravitational potential, the disturbing potential difference observations can be computed from the orbital parameter vectors in the inertial frame, using the high-low GPS-LEO GPS tracking data, the low-low satelliteto- satellite GRACE measurements, and data from 3-axis accelerometers (Jekeli, 1999). The disturbing potential observation also includes other potentials due to tides, atmosphere, other modeled signals (e.g. N-body) and the geophysical fluid signals (hydrological and oceanic mass variations), which should be recoverable from GRACE mission with a monthly resolution. The simulation results confirm that monthly geoid accuracy is expected to be a few cm with the 160 km resolution (up to degree and order 120) once other corrections are made accurately. The time-variable geoids (ocean and ground water mass) might be recovered with a noise-to-signal ratio of 0.1 with the resolution of 800 km every month assuming no temporal aliasing. Key words. GRACE mission, Energy integral, Geopotential, Satellite-to-satellite tracking, Temporal gravity field