Abstract
The impact of the GOCE satellite mission on the recovery of the gravity field is analysed for two simulated cases. In the first case the GOCE Level 2 product is used where the gravity field is approximated by spherical harmonic coefficients up to degree and order 200. In the second case synthetic GOCE Level 1B data are used directly in a gravity field determination using least squares collocation. In case two the full spectrum geoid error was improved from 31 cm to 15 cm and the resolution was doubled.
To get reliable errors associated with the mean dynamic topography (MDT) a reliable model for the spectral characteristics of the MDT is needed. Such a model was derived reflecting empirically derived properties such as MDT variance and correlation length. Combining the MDT characteristics with the estimated geoid errors in the spectral domain resulted in a-posteori error estimates. In the two cases the MDT errors were improved from 20 cm to 6 cm and 5 cm respectively. For the geostrophic surface current components the errors were improved from 23 cm/s to 18 cm/s and 16 cm/s.
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Knudsen, P., Tscherning, C.C. (2007). Error Characteristics of Dynamic Topography Models Derived from Altimetry and GOCE Gravimetry. In: Tregoning, P., Rizos, C. (eds) Dynamic Planet. International Association of Geodesy Symposia, vol 130. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-540-49350-1_2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-540-49350-1_2
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