Towards integrated essential variables for sustainability

ABSTRACT

Measuring the achievement of a sustainable development requires the integration of various data sets and disciplines describing bio-physical and socio-economic conditions. These data allow characterizing any location on Earth, assessing the status of the environment at various scales (e.g. national, regional, global), understanding interactions between different systems (e.g. atmosphere, hydrosphere, biosphere, geosphere), and modeling future changes. The Group on Earth Observations (GEO) was established in 2005 in response to the need for coordinated, comprehensive, and sustained observations related to the state of the Earth. GEO’s global engagement priorities include supporting the UN 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development, the Paris Agreement on Climate, and the Sendai Framework for Disaster Risk Reduction. A proposition is made for generalizing and integrating the concept of EVs across the Societal Benefit Areas of GEO and across the border between Socio-Economic and Earth systems EVs. The contributions of the European Union projects ConnectinGEO and GEOEssential in the evaluation of existing EV classes are introduced. Finally, the main aim of the 10 papers of the special issue is shortly presented and mapped according to the proposed typology of SBA-related EV classes.     

Improving georeferencing accuracy of Very High Resolution satellite imagery using freely available ancillary data at global coverage

ABSTRACT

While impressive direct geolocation accuracies better than 5.0?m CE90 (90% of circular error) can be achieved from the last DigitalGlobe’s Very High Resolution (VHR) satellites (i.e. GeoEye-1 and WorldView-1/2/3/4), it is insufficient for many precise geodetic applications. For these sensors, the best horizontal geopositioning accuracies (around 0.55?m CE90) can be attained by using third-order 3D rational functions with vendor’s rational polynomial coefficients data refined by a zero-order polynomial adjustment obtained from a small number of very accurate ground control points (GCPs). However, these high-quality GCPs are not always available. In this work, two different approaches for improving the initial direct geolocation accuracy of VHR satellite imagery are proposed. Both of them are based on the extraction of three-dimensional GCPs from freely available ancillary data at global coverage such as multi-temporal information of Google Earth and the Shuttle Radar Topography Mission 30?m digital elevation model. The application of these approaches on WorldView-2 and GeoEye-1 stereo pairs over two different study sites proved to improve the horizontal direct geolocation accuracy values around of 75%.     

Small satellites for global coverage: Potential and limits

There is an increasing need for Earth Observation (EO) missions to meet the information requirements in connection with Global Change Studies. Small and cost-effective missions are powerful tools to flexibly react to information requirements with space-borne solutions. Small satellite missions can be conducted relatively quickly and inexpensively by using commercial off-the-shelf-technologies, or they can be enhanced by using advanced technologies. A new class of advanced small satellites, including autonomously operating “intelligent” satellites may be created, opening new fields of application. The increasing number of small satellites and their applications drive developments in the fields of small launchers, small ground station networks, cost-effective data distribution methods, and cost-effective management and quality assurance procedures. There are many advantages of small satellite missions, like more frequent mission opportunities, a faster return of data, larger variety of missions, more rapid expansion of the technical and/or scientific knowledge base, greater involvement of small industry, feasibility by universities and others.This paper deals with general trends in the field of small satellite missions for Earth observation. Special attention is given to the potential of spatial, spectral, and temporal resolution of small satellite based systems. Examples show small satellites offer also the unique possibility to install affordable constellations to provide good daily coverage of the globe and/or allow us to observe dynamic phenomena.The facts and examples given in this paper lead to the conclusion: Small satellites are already powerful tools for monitoring global, regional and local phenomena. In the future, their application spectrum will even broaden based on the ongoing development in many areas of technology and observation techniques.     

First results of the earth observation Water Cycle Multi-mission Observation Strategy (WACMOS)

Observing and monitoring the different components of the global water cycle and their dynamics are essential steps to understand the climate of the Earth, forecast the weather, predict natural disasters like floods and droughts, and improve water resources management. Earth observation technology is a unique tool to provide a global understanding of many of the essential variables governing the water cycle and monitor their evolution from global to basin scales. In the coming years, an increasing number of Earth observation missions will provide an unprecedented capacity to quantify several of these variables on a routine basis. However, this growing observational capacity is also increasing the need for dedicated research efforts aimed at exploring the potential offered by the synergies among different and complementary EO data records. In this context, the European Space Agency (ESA) launched the Water Cycle Multi-mission Observation Strategy (WACMOS) in 2009 aiming at enhancing, developing and validating a novel set of multi-mission based methods and algorithms to retrieve a number of key variables relevant to the water cycle. In particular the project addressed four major scientific challenges associated to a number of key variables governing the water cycle: evapotranspiration, soil moisture, cloud properties related to surface solar irradiance and precipitation, and water vapour. This paper provides an overview of the scientific results and findings with the ultimate goal of demonstrating the potential of strategies based on utilizing multi-mission observations in maximizing the synergistic use of the different types of information provided by the currently available observation systems and establish the basis for further work.     

Use of earth observation data for applications in public health

The Earth Observation (EO) data with their advantages in spectral, spatial and temporal resolutions have demonstrated their great value in providing information about many of the components that comprise environmental systems and ecosystems for decades that are crucial to the understating of public health issues. This literature review shows that in conjunction with in situ data collection, EO data have been used to observe, monitor, measure and model many environmental variables that are associated with disease vectors. Furthermore, satellite derived aerosol optical depth has been increasingly employed to estimate ground-level PM_2.5 concentrations, which have been found to associate with various health outcomes such as cardiovascular and respiratory diseases. It is suggested that Landsat-like imagery data may provide important data sources to analyse and understand contagious and infectious diseases at the local and regional scales, which are tied to urbanisation and associated impacts on the environment. There is also a great need of data products from coarse resolution imagery, such as those from moderate resolution imaging spectrometer, multiangle imaging spectroradiometer and geostationary operational environmental satellite , to model and characterise infectious diseases at the continental and global scales. The infectious diseases at greater geographical scales have become unprecedentedly significant as global climate change and the process of globalisation intensify. The relationship between infectious diseases and environmental characteristic have been explored by using statistical, geostatistical and physical models, with recent emphasis on the use of machine-learning techniques such as artificial neural networks. Lastly, we suggest that the planned HyspIRI mission is crucial for observing, measuring and modelling environmental variables impacting various diseases as it will improve both spectral resolution and revisit time, thus contributing to better prediction of occurrence of infectious diseases, target intervention and tracking of epidemic events.     

Development of time series stacks of Landsat images for reconstructing forest disturbance history

Abstract

Forest dynamics is highly relevant to a broad range of earth science studies, many of which have geographic coverage ranging from regional to global scales. While the temporally dense Landsat acquisitions available in many regions provide a unique opportunity for understanding forest disturbance history dating back to 1972, large quantities of Landsat images will need to be analysed for studies at regional to global scales. This will not only require effective change detection algorithms, but also highly automated, high level preprocessing capabilities to produce images with subpixel geolocation accuracies and best achievable radiometric consistency, a status called imagery-ready-to-use (IRU). This paper describes a streamlined approach for producing IRU quality Landsat time series stacks (LTSS). This approach consists of an image selection protocol, high level preprocessing algorithms and IRU quality verification procedures. The high level preprocessing algorithms include updated radiometric calibration and atmospheric correction for calculating surface reflectance and precision registration and orthorectification routines for improving geolocation accuracy. These automated routines have been implemented in the Landsat Ecosystem Disturbance Adaptive System (LEDAPS) designed for processing large quantities of Landsat images. Some characteristics of the LTSS developed using this approach are discussed.     

Earth2014: 1 arc-min shape,topography, bedrock and ice-sheet models – Available as gridded data and degree-10,800 spherical harmonics

Since the release of the ETOPO1 global Earth topography model through the US NOAA in 2009, new or significantly improved topographic data sets have become available over Antarctica, Greenland and parts of the oceans. Here, we present a suite of new 1′ (arc-min) models of Earth’s topography, bedrock and ice-sheets constructed as a composite from up-to-date topography models: Earth2014. Our model suite relies on SRTM30_PLUS v9 bathymetry for the base layer, merged with SRTM v4.1 topography over the continents, Bedmap2 over Antarctica and the new Greenland bedrock topography (GBT v3). As such, Earth2014 provides substantially improved information of bedrock and topography over Earth’s major ice sheets, and more recent bathymetric depth data over the oceans, all merged into readily usable global grids. To satisfy multiple applications of global elevation data, Earth2014 provides different representations of Earth’s relief. These are grids of (1) the physical surface, (2) bedrock (Earth’s relief without water and ice masses), (3) bedrock and ice (Earth without water masses), (4) ice sheet thicknesses, (5) rock-equivalent topography (ice and water masses condensed to layers of rock) as mass representation. These models have been transformed into ultra-high degree spherical harmonics, yielding degree 10,800 series expansions of the Earth2014 grids as input for spectral modelling techniques. As further variants, planetary shape models were constructed, providing distances between relief points and the geocenter. The paper describes the input data sets, the development procedures applied, the resulting gridded and spectral representations of Earth2014, external validation results and possible applications. The Earth2014 model suite is freely available via http://ddfe.curtin.edu.au/models/Earth2014/.     

地球系统空间观测:从科学卫星到月基平台

五十多年来,全球性对地观测已形成强大的技术能力和系统体系,在不同应用领域发挥了重要作用。随着对陆地、大气、海洋研究的深入,地球系统科学和全球变化研究正在向空间对地观测技术提出新的重大战略性需求。本文描述了面向全球变化应对、发展全球变化系列科学卫星的方案;提出面向宏观地球科学现象探测、构建月基对地观测系统的设想;同时,作为宏观地球科学现象研究的一个方向,论述了利用地球科学卫星和月基对地观测技术开展全球变化"三极"对比研究的思路。     

Digital Earth: a new challenge and new vision

ABSTRACT

Digital Earth has seen great progress during the last 19 years. When it entered into the era of big data, Digital Earth developed into a new stage, namely one characterized by ‘Big Earth Data’, confronting new challenges and opportunities. In this paper we give an overview of the development of Digital Earth by summarizing research achievements and marking the milestones of Digital Earth’s development. Then, the opportunities and challenges that Big Earth Data faces are discussed. As a data-intensive scientific research approach, Big Earth Data provides a new vision and methodology to Earth sciences, and the paper identifies the advantages of Big Earth Data to scientific research, especially in knowledge discovery and global change research. We believe that Big Earth Data will advance and promote the development of Digital Earth.     

A RESTful proxy and data model for linked sensor data

Abstract

The vision of a Digital Earth calls for more dynamic information systems, new sources of information, and stronger capabilities for their integration. Sensor networks have been identified as a major information source for the Digital Earth, while Semantic Web technologies have been proposed to facilitate integration. So far, sensor data are stored and published using the Observations & Measurements standard of the Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) as data model. With the advent of Volunteered Geographic Information and the Semantic Sensor Web, work on an ontological model gained importance within Sensor Web Enablement (SWE). In contrast to data models, an ontological approach abstracts from implementation details by focusing on modeling the physical world from the perspective of a particular domain. Ontologies restrict the interpretation of vocabularies toward their intended meaning. The ongoing paradigm shift to Linked Sensor Data complements this attempt. Two questions have to be addressed: (1) how to refer to changing and frequently updated data sets using Uniform Resource Identifiers, and (2) how to establish meaningful links between those data sets, that is, observations, sensors, features of interest, and observed properties? In this paper, we present a Linked Data model and a RESTful proxy for OGC's Sensor Observation Service to improve integration and inter-linkage of observation data for the Digital Earth.     

A satellite data driven approach to monitoring and reporting fire disturbance and recovery across boreal and temperate forests

The regular and consistent measurements provided by Earth observation satellites can support the monitoring and reporting of forest indicators. Although substantial scientific literature espouses the capabilities of satellites in this area, the techniques are under-utilised in national reporting, where there is a preference for aggregating ad hoc data. In this paper, we posit that satellite information, while perhaps of low accuracy at single time steps or across small areas, can produce trends and patterns which are, in fact, more meaningful at regional and national scales. This is primarily due to data consistency over time and space. To investigate this, we use MODIS and Landsat data to explore trends associated with fire disturbance and recovery across boreal and temperate forests worldwide. Our results found that 181 million ha (9 %) of the study area (2 billion ha of forests) was burned between 2001 and 2018, as detected by MODIS satellites. World Wildlife Fund biomes were used for a detailed analysis across several countries. A significant increasing trend in area burned was observed in Mediterranean forests in Chile (8.9 % yr⁻¹), while a significant decreasing trend was found in temperate mixed forests in China (-2.2 % yr⁻¹). To explore trends and patterns in fire severity and forest recovery, we used Google Earth Engine to efficiently sample thousands of Landsat images from 1991 onwards. Fire severity, as measured by the change in the normalized burn ratio (NBR), was found to be generally stable over time; however, a slight increasing trend was observed in the Russian taiga. Our analysis of spectral recovery following wildfire indicated that it was largely dependent on location, with some biomes (particularly in the USA) showing signs that spectral recovery rates have shortened over time. This study demonstrates how satellite data and cloud-computing can be harnessed to establish baselines and reveal trends and patterns, and improve monitoring and reporting of forest indicators at national and global scales.     

Spherical harmonic modelling to ultra-high degree of Bouguer and isostatic anomalies

The availability of high-resolution global digital elevation data sets has raised a growing interest in the feasibility of obtaining their spherical harmonic representation at matching resolution, and from there in the modelling of induced gravity perturbations. We have therefore estimated spherical Bouguer and Airy isostatic anomalies whose spherical harmonic models are derived from the Earth’s topography harmonic expansion. These spherical anomalies differ from the classical planar ones and may be used in the context of new applications. We succeeded in meeting a number of challenges to build spherical harmonic models with no theoretical limitation on the resolution. A specific algorithm was developed to enable the computation of associated Legendre functions to any degree and order. It was successfully tested up to degree 32,400. All analyses and syntheses were performed, in 64 bits arithmetic and with semi-empirical control of the significant terms to prevent from calculus underflows and overflows, according to IEEE limitations, also in preserving the speed of a specific regular grid processing scheme. Finally, the continuation from the reference ellipsoid’s surface to the Earth’s surface was performed by high-order Taylor expansion with all grids of required partial derivatives being computed in parallel. The main application was the production of a 1′ × 1′ equiangular global Bouguer anomaly grid which was computed by spherical harmonic analysis of the Earth’s topography–bathymetry ETOPO1 data set up to degree and order 10,800, taking into account the precise boundaries and densities of major lakes and inner seas, with their own altitude, polar caps with bedrock information, and land areas below sea level. The harmonic coefficients for each entity were derived by analyzing the corresponding ETOPO1 part, and free surface data when required, at one arc minute resolution. The following approximations were made: the land, ocean and ice cap gravity spherical harmonic coefficients were computed up to the third degree of the altitude, and the harmonics of the other, smaller parts up to the second degree. Their sum constitutes what we call ETOPG1, the Earth’s TOPography derived Gravity model at 1′ resolution (half-wavelength). The EGM2008 gravity field model and ETOPG1 were then used to rigorously compute 1′ × 1′ point values of surface gravity anomalies and disturbances, respectively, worldwide, at the real Earth’s surface, i.e. at the lower limit of the atmosphere. The disturbance grid is the most interesting product of this study and can be used in various contexts. The surface gravity anomaly grid is an accurate product associated with EGM2008 and ETOPO1, but its gravity information contents are those of EGM2008. Our method was validated by comparison with a direct numerical integration approach applied to a test area in Morocco–South of Spain (Kuhn, private communication 2011) and the agreement was satisfactory. Finally isostatic corrections according to the Airy model, but in spherical geometry, with harmonic coefficients derived from the sets of the ETOPO1 different parts, were computed with a uniform depth of compensation of 30?km. The new world Bouguer and isostatic gravity maps and grids here produced will be made available through the Commission for the Geological Map of the World. Since gravity values are those of the EGM2008 model, geophysical interpretation from these products should not be done for spatial scales below 5 arc minutes (half-wavelength).     

Mission design,operation and exploitation of the gravity field and steady-state ocean circulation explorer mission

The European Space Agency’s Gravity field and steady-state ocean circulation explorer mission (GOCE) was launched on 17 March 2009. As the first of the Earth Explorer family of satellites within the Agency’s Living Planet Programme, it is aiming at a better understanding of the Earth system. The mission objective of GOCE is the determination of the Earth’s gravity field and geoid with high accuracy and maximum spatial resolution. The geoid, combined with the de facto mean ocean surface derived from twenty-odd years of satellite radar altimetry, yields the global dynamic ocean topography. It serves ocean circulation and ocean transport studies and sea level research. GOCE geoid heights allow the conversion of global positioning system (GPS) heights to high precision heights above sea level. Gravity anomalies and also gravity gradients from GOCE are used for gravity-to-density inversion and in particular for studies of the Earth’s lithosphere and upper mantle. GOCE is the first-ever satellite to carry a gravitational gradiometer, and in order to achieve its challenging mission objectives the satellite embarks a number of world-first technologies. In essence the spacecraft together with its sensors can be regarded as a spaceborne gravimeter. In this work, we describe the mission and the way it is operated and exploited in order to make available the best-possible measurements of the Earth gravity field. The main lessons learned from the first 19 months in orbit are also provided, in as far as they affect the quality of the science data products and therefore are of specific interest for GOCE data users.     

Towards a collaborative global land cover information service

ABSTRACT

The need and critical importance of global land cover and change information has been well recognized. Although rich collection of such information has been made available, the lack of necessary information services to support its easy access, analysis and validation makes it difficult to find, evaluate, select and reuse them through well-designed workflows. Aiming at promoting the development of the needed global land cover information services, this paper presents a conceptual framework for developing a Collaborative Global Land Cover Information Service (CoGland), followed by discussions on its implementation strategies. The framework supports connected and shared land cover and change web services around the world to address resource sharing, community service and cross-board collaboration needs. CoGland can benefit several recent international initiatives such as Future Earth, and many societal benefit areas. The paper further proposes that CoGland be developed within the framework of the Group on Earth Observations with the support of a number of key organizations such as the United Nations Expert Committee on Global Geospatial Information Management, the International Society for Photogrammetry and Remote Sensing, and International Society of Digital Earth. It is hoped that this paper can serve as a starting point for further discussions on CoGland developments.     

Evolution and implementation of the Digital Earth vision,technology and society

Abstract

Digital Earth's framework can be traced to evolutionary threads with historic foundations that fostered the fertile conceptual and technological incubation. These threads incorporate writings, such as those of the visionary engineering-genius, Buckminster Fuller, in conjunction with an array of space age developments in computers, internet and communications, satellites, and education. In 1998, when Vice President Al Gore articulated the Digital Earth Vision, he portrayed the vision based upon myriad technology factors for the intellectual foundation and sparked a worldwide phenomenon that fortuitously included the Chinese leadership's recognition and acceptance. The Beijing Declaration is recognised for its role promulgating the International Digital Earth Symposium series to promote better understanding of the impacts of Digital Earth technology and applications on behalf of all humankind. Combinations of industrial, academic, and government organisations have advanced the technological components necessary for implementing the Digital Earth Vision at a prodigious rate. Commercial leaders, such as Google, have accelerated the influence of large segments of society towards components of the Digital Earth Vision. However, challenges still remain regarding requisite collaboration on international standards for metadata, interoperability, and data formats for space and time that will affect Digital Earth implementation scenarios. Functional requirements for the model Digital Earth geobrowser remain to be fully articulated. The current paper presents an overview of the historical components, the key players on the international scene, the catalytic technological advances, and the societal response to the growth of the Digital Earth community.     

High-resolution atmospheric angular momentum functions related to Earth rotation parameters during CONT08

Due to the temporal resolution of available numerical weather analyses, the effect of the atmosphere on Earth rotation at daily and sub-daily periods is usually investigated using 6-hourly atmospheric angular momentum (AAM) functions. During the period of CONT08, however, atmospheric analysis data were provided by the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts (ECMWF) also on an hourly basis. In this paper, we, therefore, determine two sets of AAM functions from ECMWF data—one for CONT08 with hourly resolution and one for the year 2008 with 6-hourly resolution. The comparisons of the AAM functions to high-resolution Earth rotation parameters (ERP) from VLBI and GPS observations are carried out in the frequency domain. Special attention is paid to the preparation of the high-resolution data sets for the geodetic purposes, as there are jump discontinuities at 12 h intervals. Hence, the hourly AAM functions need to be concatenated. The revised functions yield much smaller amplitudes than their 6-hourly counterparts, as can be seen from the equatorial and the axial frequency spectra of atmospheric excitation in Earth rotation. This decrease of spectral power in the hourly AAM functions is found to be associated with a strong counteraction of pressure and wind terms, which originates from atmospheric circulation on short time scales. The results are compared to previous findings published by Brzeziński and Petrov (IERS Tech Note 28:53–60, 2000) based on the data from the U.S. National Centers for Environmental Prediction (NCEP).     

持续性全球多重覆盖的圆轨道导航星座的设计

首先描述卫星覆盖的理论以及卫星星下点在地面上的轨迹规律,然后根据导航星座的特点,通过对星座基本参数特点的讨论,并在参考GPS和GLONASS星座的基础上,确定了导航星座的构成。最后,在理论上证明了最小覆盖性的条件,随着模拟实际数据进行了验证。     

Using DORIS measurements for modeling the vertical total electron content of the Earth’s ionosphere

The Doppler orbitography and radiopositioning integrated by satellite (DORIS) system was originally developed for precise orbit determination of low Earth orbiting (LEO) satellites. Beyond that, it is highly qualified for modeling the distribution of electrons within the Earth’s ionosphere. It measures with two frequencies in L-band with a relative frequency ratio close to 5. Since the terrestrial ground beacons are distributed quite homogeneously and several LEOs are equipped with modern receivers, a good applicability for global vertical total electron content (VTEC) modeling can be expected. This paper investigates the capability of DORIS dual-frequency phase observations for deriving VTEC and the contribution of these data to global VTEC modeling. The DORIS preprocessing is performed similar to commonly used global navigation satellite systems (GNSS) preprocessing. However, the absolute DORIS VTEC level is taken from global ionospheric maps (GIM) provided by the International GNSS Service (IGS) as the DORIS data contain no absolute information. DORIS-derived VTEC values show good consistency with IGS GIMs with a RMS between 2 and 3 total electron content units (TECU) depending on solar activity which can be reduced to less than 2 TECU when using only observations with elevation angles higher than \(50^\circ \) . The combination of DORIS VTEC with data from other space-geodetic measurement techniques improves the accuracy of global VTEC models significantly. If DORIS VTEC data is used to update IGS GIMs, an improvement of up to 12  % can be achieved. The accuracy directly beneath the DORIS satellites’ ground-tracks ranges between 1.5 and 3.5 TECU assuming a precision of 2.5 TECU for altimeter-derived VTEC values which have been used for validation purposes.     

Wāhi,a discrete global grid gazetteer built using linked open data

ABSTRACT

Discrete global grid systems have become an important component of Digital Earth systems. However, previously there has not existed an easy way to map between named places (toponyms) and the cells of a discrete global grid system. The lack of such a tool has limited the opportunities to synthesize social place-based data with the more standard Earth and environmental science data currently being analyzed in Digital Earth applications. This paper introduces Wāhi, the first gazetteer to map entities from the GeoNames database to multiple discrete global grid systems. A gazetteer service is presented that exposes the grid system and the associated gazetteer data as Linked Data. A set of use cases for the discrete global grid gazetteer is discussed.     

The relation between degree-2160 spectral models of Earth’s gravitational and topographic potential: a guide on global correlation measures and their dependency on approximation effects

Comparisons between high-degree models of the Earth’s topographic and gravitational potential may give insight into the quality and resolution of the source data sets, provide feedback on the modelling techniques and help to better understand the gravity field composition. Degree correlations (cross-correlation coefficients) or reduction rates (quantifying the amount of topographic signal contained in the gravitational potential) are indicators used in a number of contemporary studies. However, depending on the modelling techniques and underlying levels of approximation, the correlation at high degrees may vary significantly, as do the conclusions drawn. The present paper addresses this problem by attempting to provide a guide on global correlation measures with particular emphasis on approximation effects and variants of topographic potential modelling. We investigate and discuss the impact of different effects (e.g., truncation of series expansions of the topographic potential, mass compression, ellipsoidal versus spherical approximation, ellipsoidal harmonic coefficient versus spherical harmonic coefficient (SHC) representation) on correlation measures. Our study demonstrates that the correlation coefficients are realistic only when the model’s harmonic coefficients of a given degree are largely independent of the coefficients of other degrees, permitting degree-wise evaluations. This is the case, e.g., when both models are represented in terms of SHCs and spherical approximation (i.e. spherical arrangement of field-generating masses). Alternatively, a representation in ellipsoidal harmonics can be combined with ellipsoidal approximation. The usual ellipsoidal approximation level (i.e. ellipsoidal mass arrangement) is shown to bias correlation coefficients when SHCs are used. Importantly, gravity models from the International Centre for Global Earth Models (ICGEM) are inherently based on this approximation level. A transformation is presented that enables a transformation of ICGEM geopotential models from ellipsoidal to spherical approximation. The transformation is applied to generate a spherical transform of EGM2008 (sphEGM2008) that can meaningfully be correlated degree-wise with the topographic potential. We exploit this new technique and compare a number of models of topographic potential constituents (e.g., potential implied by land topography, ocean water masses) based on the Earth2014 global relief model and a mass-layer forward modelling technique with sphEGM2008. Different to previous findings, our results show very significant short-scale correlation between Earth’s gravitational potential and the potential generated by Earth’s land topography (correlation +0.92, and 60% of EGM2008 signals are delivered through the forward modelling). Our tests reveal that the potential generated by Earth’s oceans water masses is largely unrelated to the geopotential at short scales, suggesting that altimetry-derived gravity and/or bathymetric data sets are significantly underpowered at 5 arc-min scales. We further decompose the topographic potential into the Bouguer shell and terrain correction and show that they are responsible for about 20 and 25% of EGM2008 short-scale signals, respectively. As a general conclusion, the paper shows the importance of using compatible models in topographic/gravitational potential comparisons and recommends the use of SHCs together with spherical approximation or EHCs with ellipsoidal approximation in order to avoid biases in the correlation measures.