What Can be Expected from the GRACE-FO Laser Ranging Interferometer for Earth Science Applications?

Flechtner, Frank; Neumayer, Karl Hans; Dahle, Christoph; Dobslaw, Henryk; Fagiolini, Elisa; Raimondo, J. C.; Güntner, Andreas

doi:10.1007/s10712-015-9338-y

Cited by 155 publications

(117 citation statements)

References 23 publications

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“…Thanks to the success of the GRACE mission that exceeded threefold its design life, a nearly identical follow‐on mission, namely, the GRACE follow‐on (GRACE‐FO or GFO), was launched on 22 May 2018. GRACE‐FO will continue tracking the Earth's mass movements, particularly water mass storage and transport (Flechtner et al, ), providing invaluable information on processes occurring in the Earth system.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Gravity Gradiometry With GRACE Space Missions: New Opportunities for the Geosciences

Peidou

Pagiatakis

2019

JGR Solid Earth

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A new paradigm views the recently launched Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment (GRACE) follow‐on mission as a gradiometer system, outside the mission's design concept, promising potentially major implications in geosciences. We develop an innovative and straightforward concept, the “GRACE gradiometer mode,” to process future GRACE follow‐on measurements to derive three‐dimensional gravitational gradients. Using positions, accelerations, and attitude measurements from the identical predecessor mission GRACE, we generate common and differential accelerations. We validate GRACE differential accelerations using Gravity field and steady‐state Ocean Circulation Explorer (GOCE) mission gradiometer measurements and we demonstrate an important and promising agreement between GRACE and GOCE. Consequently, we estimate gravitational gradients in full and we confirm their ability to detect geophysical signals over three example regions, namely, the Himalayas, Indonesia, and Canada. Coherence analysis between GOCE and GRACE gradients reveals a strong match that reaches up to 80%. GRACE gradiometer mode gradients are also compared with GRACE level 2‐ derived gradients, and results show that the new method captures smaller spatial‐scale signals than GOCE with the trade‐off being at higher noise level. We argue that future enhancements of the proposed proof‐of‐concept method will expand and enhance the GRACE follow‐on objectives that will lead to new insights, discoveries, and applications in the Earth system and the geosciences.

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Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Gravity Gradiometry With GRACE Space Missions: New Opportunities for the Geosciences

Peidou

Pagiatakis

2019

JGR Solid Earth

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“…For static gravity field modeling, error sources originating from instrument errors (Chen et al, ; Klinger & Mayer‐Gürr, ) and imperfect background force models (especially aliasing errors from ocean models and oceanic and atmospheric nontidal variation models; Kurtenbach et al, ; Seo et al, ) and orbit configuration (Dobslaw et al, ; Flechtner et al, ; Liu et al, ; Save, ) are generally recognized as the crucial factors affecting the quality of the estimated geopotential coefficients. As one of the most important error sources, the instrument errors caused by limited sensitivities of the sensors directly contaminate the primary GRACE observations (i.e., orbits, range rates, attitudes, and accelerations).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Tongji‐Grace02s and Tongji‐Grace02k: High‐Precision Static GRACE‐Only Global Earth's Gravity Field Models Derived by Refined Data Processing Strategies

et al. 2018

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In order to derive high‐precision static Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment (GRACE)‐only gravity field solutions, the following strategies were implemented in this study: (1) a refined accelerometer calibration model that treats monthly accelerometer scales as a third‐order polynomial and daily accelerometer biases as a fifth‐order polynomial was developed to calibrate accelerometer measurements; (2) the errors of the acceleration and attitude data were estimated together with the geopotential coefficients and accelerometer parameters on the basis of the weighted least squares adjustments; (3) a nearly complete observation series of GRACE mission was used to decrease the condition number of normal equation; and (4) the GRACE data collected in lower orbit altitude were also included to decrease the condition number. Our results show that (1) the refined accelerometer calibration model with much less parameters performs as well as previous methods (i.e., solving daily scales and hourly biases or estimating biases along with bias rates every 2 hr). However, it provides a system of more stable normal equation and less high‐frequency noise in gravity field solutions; (2) high‐frequency noise in the gravity field solution is reduced by modeling the errors of the acceleration and attitude data; (3) the geopotential coefficients at all degrees is greatly enhanced by using longer GRACE time series (especially the data by the end of 2010); and (4) due to lower orbit altitude, the GRACE data collected since 2014 lead to a significant improvement of the gravity field solution as the satellites are more sensitive to higher‐frequency signal. Using the refined strategies, an unconstrained static solution (named Tongji‐Grace02s) up to degree and order 180 was derived. For further suppressing the high‐frequency noise, a regularization strategy based on the Kaula rule is applied to the degrees and orders beyond 80, leading to a regularized model Tongji‐Grace02k. To validate the quality of the derived models, both Tongji‐Grace02s and Tongji‐Grace02k were compared to the latest GRACE‐only models (i.e., GGM05S, ITU_GRACE16, ITSG‐Grace2014s, and ITSG‐Grace2014k) and validated using independent data (i.e., Global Navigation Satellite Systems (GNSS)/Leveling data and DTU13 oceanic gravity data). Compared to other models, much less spatial noise in terms of global gravity anomalies with respect to the state‐of‐the‐art model EIGEN6C4 and far higher accuracy at high degrees are achieved by Tongji‐Grace02s. The same conclusions can be drawn for Tongji‐Grace02k when the same analyses were applied to the regularized solutions ITSG‐Grace2014k and Tongji‐Grace02k. Validations with independent data confirm that Tongji‐Grace02s has the least noise among the unconstrained GRACE‐only models and Tongji‐Grace02k is the one with the best accuracy among the regularized GRACE‐only solutions. For the tests up to degree and order 180 using GNSS/Leveling data, the improvements of Tongji‐Grace02s with respect to ITSG‐Grace2014s reach 13% over ...

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“…It indicates the need for the continuation of GRACE-type satellite missions which could provide a long-term continuous information on mass transport in the Earth system. The first one which will overlap with GRACE mission is GRACE Follow-on (GRACE-FO) mission that has been scheduled for launch in August 2017 (e.g., Flechtner et al 2016). During the past years, many investigations (e.g., Tapley et al 2004;Chambers 2006;Swenson and Wahr 2007;Luthcke et al 2013;Krynski et al 2014;Wu and Heflin 2015;Guo et al 2016) concerning the determination of temporal mass variations in the Earth system using GRACE data have been conducted worldwide.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

On the analysis of temporal geoid height variations obtained from GRACE-based GGMs over the area of Poland

2017

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Temporal mass variations in the Earth system, which can be detected from the Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment (GRACE) mission data, cause temporal variations of geoid heights. The main objective of this contribution is to analyze temporal variations of geoid heights over the area of Poland using global geopotential models (GGMs) developed on the basis of GRACE mission data. Time series of geoid height variations were calculated for the chosen subareas of the aforementioned area using those GGMs. Thereafter, these variations were analyzed using two different methods. On the basis of the analysis results, models of temporal geoid height variations were developed and discussed. The possibility of prediction of geoid height variations using GRACE mission data over the area of Poland was also investigated. The main findings reveal that the geoid height over the area of Poland vary within 1.1 cm which should be considered when defining the geoid model of 1 cm accuracy for this area.

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What Can be Expected from the GRACE-FO Laser Ranging Interferometer for Earth Science Applications?

Cited by 155 publications

References 23 publications

Gravity Gradiometry With GRACE Space Missions: New Opportunities for the Geosciences

Gravity Gradiometry With GRACE Space Missions: New Opportunities for the Geosciences

Tongji‐Grace02s and Tongji‐Grace02k: High‐Precision Static GRACE‐Only Global Earth's Gravity Field Models Derived by Refined Data Processing Strategies

On the analysis of temporal geoid height variations obtained from GRACE-based GGMs over the area of Poland

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