Comparison of present SST gravity field models

Abstract

Taking the main land of Europe as the region to be studied, the potential of the new satellite gravity technique: satellite-to-satellite tracking (SST) and improving the accuracy of regional gravity field model with the SST models are investigated. The drawbacks of these models are discussed. With GPM98C as the reference, the gravity anomaly residuals of several other models, the latest SST global gravity field models (EIGEN series and GGM series), were computed and compared. The results of the comparison show that in the selected region, some systematic errors with periodical properties exist in the EIGEN and GGM's S series models in the high degree and order. Some information that was not shown in the classic gravity models is detected in the low and middle degree and order of EIGEN and GGM's S series models. At last, the effective maximum degrees and orders of SST models are suggested.