Marine gravity and geoid determination by optimal combination of satellite altimetry and shipborne gravimetry data

. Satellite altimetry derived geoid heights and marine gravity anomalies can be combined to determine a detailed gravity field over the oceans using the least-squares collocation method and spectral combination techniques. Least-squares collocation, least-squares adjustment in the frequency domain and input-output system theory are employed to determine the gravity field (both geoid and anomalies) and its errors. This paper intercompares these three techniques using simulated data. Simulation studies show that best results are obtained by the input-output system theory among the three prediction methods. The least-squares collocation method gives results which are very close to but a little bit worse than those obtained using input-output system theory. This slightly poorer performance of the least-squares collocation method can be explained by the fact that it uses isotropic structured covariance (thus approximate signal PSD information) while the system theory method uses detailed signal PSD information. The method of least-squares adjustment in the frequency domain gives the poorest results among these three methods because it uses less information than the other two methods (it ignores the signal PSDs). The computations also show that the least-squares collocation and input-output system theory methods are not as sensitive to noise levels as the least-squares adjustment in the frequency domain method is. Received 19 January 1996; Accepted 17 July 1996