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Feasibility study on application of satellite formations for eliminating the influence from aliasing error of ocean tide model

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Abstract

Currently, aliasing error of temporal signal model becomes the main factor constraining the accuracy of temporal gravity field. In provision of three types of satellite formations, i.e., GRACE-type, Pendulum-type and n-s-Cartwheel-type, which are suitable for gravity mission and composed of observation in different directions, here we design two cases and conduct a simulation experiment on the feasibility to apply satellite formations for eliminating the influence from the aliasing error of ocean tide models. The result of our experiment shows that, when the aliasing error is disregarded, n-s-Cartwheel formation can provide the best conditions for gravity field determination, which, compared with GRACE-type, can improve the accuracy by 43%. When aliasing error of the ocean tide model acts as the main source of error, the satellite formation applied in dynamic method for gravity field inversion cannot eliminate aliasing or improve the accuracy of gravity field. And due to its higher sensitivity to the high-degree variation of gravity field, the Cartwheel-type formation, which includes the radial observation, can result in the gravity field containing more high-frequency signals for the ocean tide model error, and lead to a dramatically larger error.

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Correspondence to WeiPing Jiang.

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Zhao, Q., Jiang, W., Xu, X. et al. Feasibility study on application of satellite formations for eliminating the influence from aliasing error of ocean tide model. Sci. China Earth Sci. 58, 474–481 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11430-014-5010-5

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11430-014-5010-5

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