Geoid and high resolution sea surface topography modelling in the mediterranean from gravimetry,altimetry and GOCE data: evaluation by simulation

The determination of local geoid models has traditionally been carried out on land and at sea using gravity anomaly and satellite altimetry data, while it will be aided by the data expected from satellite missions such as those from the Gravity field and steady-state ocean circulation explorer (GOCE). To assess the performance of heterogeneous data combination to local geoid determination, simulated data for the central Mediterranean Sea are analyzed. These data include marine and land gravity anomalies, altimetric sea surface heights, and GOCE observations processed with the space-wise approach. A spectral analysis of the aforementioned data shows their complementary character. GOCE data cover long wavelengths and account for the lack of such information from gravity anomalies. This is exploited for the estimation of local covariance function models, where it is seen that models computed with GOCE data and gravity anomaly empirical covariance functions perform better than models computed without GOCE data. The geoid is estimated by different data combinations and the results show that GOCE data improve the solutions for areas covered poorly with other data types, while also accounting for any long wavelength errors of the adopted reference model that exist even when the ground gravity data are dense. At sea, the altimetric data provide the dominant geoid information. However, the geoid accuracy is sensitive to orbit calibration errors and unmodeled sea surface topography (SST) effects. If such effects are present, the combination of GOCE and gravity anomaly data can improve the geoid accuracy. The present work also presents results from simulations for the recovery of the stationary SST, which show that the combination of geoid heights obtained from a spherical harmonic geopotential model derived from GOCE with satellite altimetry data can provide SST models with some centimeters of error. However, combining data from GOCE with gravity anomalies in a collocation approach can result in the estimation of a higher resolution geoid, more suitable for high resolution mean dynamic SST modeling. Such simulations can be performed toward the development and evaluation of SST recovery methods.     

Impact of accounting for coloured noise in radar altimetry data on a regional quasi-geoid model

We study the impact of an accurate computation and incorporation of coloured noise in radar altimeter data when computing a regional quasi-geoid model using least-squares techniques. Our test area comprises the Southern North Sea including the Netherlands, Belgium, and parts of France, Germany, and the UK. We perform the study by modelling the disturbing potential with spherical radial base functions. To that end, we use the traditional remove-compute-restore procedure with a recent GRACE/GOCE static gravity field model. Apart from radar altimeter data, we use terrestrial, airborne, and shipboard gravity data. Radar altimeter sea surface heights are corrected for the instantaneous dynamic topography and used in the form of along-track quasi-geoid height differences. Noise in these data are estimated using repeat-track and post-fit residual analysis techniques and then modelled as an auto regressive moving average process. Quasi-geoid models are computed with and without taking the modelled coloured noise into account. The difference between them is used as a measure of the impact of coloured noise in radar altimeter along-track quasi-geoid height differences on the estimated quasi-geoid model. The impact strongly depends on the availability of shipboard gravity data. If no such data are available, the impact may attain values exceeding 10 centimetres in particular areas. In case shipboard gravity data are used, the impact is reduced, though it still attains values of several centimetres. We use geometric quasi-geoid heights from GPS/levelling data at height markers as control data to analyse the quality of the quasi-geoid models. The quasi-geoid model computed using a model of the coloured noise in radar altimeter along-track quasi-geoid height differences shows in some areas a significant improvement over a model that assumes white noise in these data. However, the interpretation in other areas remains a challenge due to the limited quality of the control data.     

Analysis of some systematic errors affecting altimeter-derived sea surface gradient with application to geoid determination over Taiwan

This paper analyzes several systematic errors affecting sea surface gradients derived from Seasat, Geosat/ERM, Geosat/GM, ERS-1/35d, ERS-1/GM and TOPEX/POSEIDON altimetry. Considering the data noises, the conclusion is: (1) only Seasat needs to correct for the non-geocentricity induced error, (2) only Seasat and Geosat/GM need to correct for the one cycle per revolution error, (3) only Seasat, ERS-1/GM and Geosat/GM need to correct for the tide model error; over shallow waters it is suggested to use a local tide model not solely from altimetry. The effects of the sea surface topography on gravity and geoid computations from altimetry are significant over areas with major oceanographic phenomena. In conclusion, sea surface gradient is a better data type than sea surface height. Sea surface gradients from altimetry, land gravity anomalies, ship gravity anomalies and elevation data were then used to calculate the geoid over Taiwan by least-squares collocation. The inclusion of sea surface gradients improves the geoid prediction by 27% when comparing the GPS-derived and the predicted geoidal heights, and by 30% when comparing the observed and the geoid-derived deflections of the vertical. The predicted geoid along coastal areas is accurate to 2 cm and can help GPS to do the third-order leveling. Received 22 January 1996; Accepted 13 September 1996     

Global mean sea surface and marine gravity anomaly from multi-satellite altimetry: applications of deflection-geoid and inverse Vening Meinesz formulae

 Global mean sea surface heights (SSHs) and gravity anomalies on a 2^′×2^′ grid were determined from Seasat, Geosat (Exact Repeat Mission and Geodetic Mission), ERS-1 (1.5-year mean of 35-day, and GM), TOPEX/POSEIDON (T/P) (5.6-year mean) and ERS-2 (2-year mean) altimeter data over the region 0^∘–360^∘ longitude and –80^∘–80^∘ latitude. To reduce ocean variabilities and data noises, SSHs from non-repeat missions were filtered by Gaussian filters of various wavelengths. A Levitus oceanic dynamic topography was subtracted from the altimeter-derived SSHs, and the resulting heights were used to compute along-track deflection of the vertical (DOV). Geoidal heights and gravity anomalies were then computed from DOV using the deflection-geoid and inverse Vening Meinesz formulae. The Levitus oceanic dynamic topography was added back to the geoidal heights to obtain a preliminary sea surface grid. The difference between the T/P mean sea surface and the preliminary sea surface was computed on a grid by a minimum curvature method and then was added to the preliminary grid. The comparison of the NCTU01 mean sea surface height (MSSH) with the T/P and the ERS-1 MSSH result in overall root-mean-square (RMS) differences of 5.0 and 3.1 cm in SSH, respectively, and 7.1 and 3.2 μrad in SSH gradient, respectively. The RMS differences between the predicted and shipborne gravity anomalies range from 3.0 to 13.4 mGal in 12 areas of the world's oceans. Received: 26 September 2001 / Accepted: 3 April 2002 Correspondence to: C. Hwang Acknowledgements. This research is partly supported by the National Science Council of ROC, under grants NSC89-2611-M-009-003-OP2 and NSC89-2211-E-009-095. This is a contribution to the IAG Special Study Group 3.186. The Geosat and ERS1/2 data are from NOAA and CERSAT/France, respectively. The T/P data were provided by AVISO. The CLS and GSFC00 MSS models were kindly provided by NASA/GSFC and CLS, respectively. Drs. Levitus, Monterey, and Boyer are thanked for providing the SST model. Dr. T. Gruber and two anonymous reviewers provided very detailed reviews that improved the quality of this paper.     

Detailed gravimetric geoid confirmation of sea surface topography detected by the skylab S-193 altimeter in the Atlantic Ocean

A detailed gravimetric geoid has been computed for the Nortwest Atlantic Ocean and Caribbean Sea area in support of the calibration and evaluation of the GEOS-3 altimeter. This geoid, computed on a 15’ x 15’ grid was based upon a combination of surface gravity data and the GSFC GEM-8 gravitational field model. This gravimetric geoid has been compared with passes of SKYLAB altimeter data recorded in the Atlantic Ocean, and three typical passes are presented. The relative agreement of the two data types is quite good with differences generally less than 2 meters for these passes. Sea surface manifestations of numerous short wavelength (≈ 100 km) oceanographic features indicated in the altimeter data are also confirmed by the gravimetric geoid.     

Gravity field convolutions without windowing and edge effects

A new set of formulas has been developed for the computation of geoid undulations and terrain corrections by FFT when the input gravity anomalies and heights are mean gridded values. The effects of the analytical and the discrete spectra of kernel functions and that of zero-padding on the computation of geoid undulations and terrain corrections are studied in detail.Numerical examples show that the discrete spectrum is superior to the analytically-defined one. By using the discrete spectrum and 100% zero-padding, the RMS differences are 0.000 m for the FFT geoid undulations and 0.200 to 0.000 mGal for the FFT terrain corrections compared with results obtained by numerical integration.     

Harmonic continuation and gridding effects on geoid height prediction

Least-squares collocation and Stokes integral formula, as implemented using the Fast Fourier Technique, handle the harmonic downward continuation problem quite differently. FFT furthermore requires gridded data, amplifying the difference of methods.We have in this paper studied numerically the effects of downward continuation and gridding in a mountainous area in central Norway. Topographically smoothed data were used in order to reduce these effects. Despite the smoothing, it was found that the vertical gravity gradient had values up to -11 mgal/km. The corresponding differences between geoid heights and the height anomalies at altitude reached 12 cm.The differences between geoid heights obtained using collocation or FFT with gravity data at terrain level or sea level showed differences between the values of up to 10 cm r.m.s. A part of this difference was a consequence of different data areas used in the FFT and collocation solution, though.Major discrepancies between the solutions were found in areas where the topographic smoothing could not be applied (deep fjords with no depth information in the used DTM) or where there seemed to be gross errors in the data.We conclude that proper handling of harmonic continuation is important, even when we as here have used a 1 km resolution DTM for the calculation of topographic effects. The effect of data gridding, required for the FFT method, seems not to be as serious as the need to limit the data distribution area, required when least squares collocation is used with randomly distributed data.     

利用卫星测高资料反演海底地形研究

论述了利用卫星测高数据反演海底地形地解析算法和统计算法的基本原理和数学模型，在此基础上，基于最小二乘配置理论，提出了统计算法的改进模型。使用新模型在南中国海地区进行了海底地形反演计算，并将反演结果与实际船测水深进行比对，进一步验证改进模型的可靠性和有效性。     

Determination of Geoid over South China Sea and Philippine Sea from Multi-satellite Altimetry Data

A new computational procedure for derivation of marine geoid on a 2.5′×2.5′grid in a non-tidal system over the South China Sea and the Philippine Sea from multi-satellite altimeter sea surface heights is discussed. Single-and dual-satellite crossovers were performed, and components of deflections of the vertical were determined at the crossover positions using Sand-well's computational theory, and gridded onto a 2.5′×2.5′resolution grid by employing the Shepard's interpolation procedure. 2.5′×2.5′grid of EGM96-derived components of deflections of the vertical and geoid heights were then used as reference global geopotential model quantities in a remove-restore procedure to implement the Molodensky-like formula via 1D-FFT technique to predict the geoid heights over the South China Sea and the Philippine Sea from the gridded altimeter-derived components of deflec-tions of the vertical. Statistical comparisons between the altimeter-and the EGM96- derived geoid heights showed that there was a root-mean-square agreement of ±0.35 m between them in a region of less tectonically active geological structures. However, over areas of tectonically active structures such as the Philippine trench, differences of about -19.9 m were obtained.     

Recovery of Bathymetry from Altimeter Data

At present,there exist two methods used to recover the bathymetry from altimeter data,i.e.the deterministic method and the stochastic method.In this paper,the principles of the two methods are introduced first.Then according to the theory of leastsquare collocation,a modified statistical model for recovering bathymetry from altimeter data is proposed.The new model has been used for computing the ocean depth in the South China Sea from altimeter-derived gravity anomalies.Finally the predicted depths are compared with the ship-borne depth.It shows that they agree with each other very well.     

Role of ocean variability and dynamic ocean topography in the recovery of the mean sea surface and gravity anomalies from satellite altimeter data

Procedures to calculate mean sea surface heights and gravity anomalies from altimeter-derived sea surface heights and along-track sea surface slopes using the least-squares collocation procedure are derived. The slope data is used when repeat track averaging is not possible to reduce ocean variability effects. Tests were carried out using Topex, Geosat, ERS-1 [35-day and 168-day (2 cycle)] data. Calculations of gravity anomalies in the Gulf Stream region were made using the sea surface height and slope data. Tests were also made correcting the sea surface heights for dynamic ocean topography calculated from a degree 360 expansion of data from the POCM-4B global ocean circulation model. Comparisons of the anomaly predictions were carried out with ship data using anomalies calculated for this paper as well as others. Received: 19 August 1996 / Accepted: 14 April 1997     

Coastal Gravity Anomalies from Retracked Geosat/GM Altimetry: Improvement, Limitation and the Role of Airborne Gravity Data

We process geophysical and waveform data records of the Geosat/GM (geodetic mission) satellite altimeter mission for waveform retracking and applications. An improved threshold retracker is developed. The performances of the Beta-5, threshold and improved threshold retrackers are assessed over waters around Taiwan. The improved threshold retracker outperforms the other two. The improvement in the accuracy of sea surface height (SSH) is investigated according to marine zone and the distance of waters to the shore. The improvement rate increases closer to the land, with the largest improvement rate of about 20% in waters within 10 km of the shore. Over waters around islands and coasts, there are still retracked SSHs with large errors. Least-squares collocation is used to compute gravity anomalies from the Geosat/GM altimeter data. Use of retracked SSHs improves the accuracy of gravity anomalies by about 11%. Adding airborne gravity data further improves the accuracy, especially in the immediate vicinity of the coasts. Tide model errors over coastal waters remain a problem in altimetry applications, even if the waveforms are properly retracked.     

A comparison of Stokes' numerical integration and collocation,and a new combination technique

Summary Basically two different evaluation methods are available to compute geoid heights from residual gravity anomalies in the inner zone: numerical integration and least squares collocation.If collocation is not applied to a global gravity data set, as is usually the case in practice, its result will not be equal to the numerical integration result. However, the cross covariance function between geoid heights and gravity anomalies can be adapted such that the geoid contribution is computed only from a small gravity area up to a certain distance _o from the computation point. Using this modification, identical results are obtained as from numerical integration.Applying this modification makes the results less dependent on the covariance function used. The difference between numerical integration and collocation is mainly caused by the implicitly extrapolated residual gravity anomaly values, outside the original data area. This extrapolated signal depends very much on the covariance function used, while the interpolated values within the original data area depend much less on it.As a sort of by-product, this modified collocation formula also leads to a new combination technique of numerical integration and collocation, in which the optimizing practical properties of both methods are fully exploited.Numerical examples are added as illustration.     

Effect of the SRTM global DEM on the determination of a high-resolution geoid model: a case study in Iran

Any errors in digital elevation models (DEMs) will introduce errors directly in gravity anomalies and geoid models when used in interpolating Bouguer gravity anomalies. Errors are also propagated into the geoid model by the topographic and downward continuation (DWC) corrections in the application of Stokes’s formula. The effects of these errors are assessed by the evaluation of the absolute accuracy of nine independent DEMs for the Iran region. It is shown that the improvement in using the high-resolution Shuttle Radar Topography Mission (SRTM) data versus previously available DEMs in gridding of gravity anomalies, terrain corrections and DWC effects for the geoid model are significant. Based on the Iranian GPS/levelling network data, we estimate the absolute vertical accuracy of the SRTM in Iran to be 6.5 m, which is much better than the estimated global accuracy of the SRTM (say 16 m). Hence, this DEM has a comparable accuracy to a current photogrammetric high-resolution DEM of Iran under development. We also found very large differences between the GLOBE and SRTM models on the range of −750 to 550 m. This difference causes an error in the range of −160 to 140 mGal in interpolating surface gravity anomalies and −60 to 60 mGal in simple Bouguer anomaly correction terms. In the view of geoid heights, we found large differences between the use of GLOBE and SRTM DEMs, in the range of −1.1 to 1 m for the study area. The terrain correction of the geoid model at selected GPS/levelling points only differs by 3 cm for these two DEMs.     

Applications of downward-continuation in gravimetric geoid modeling: case studies in Western Canada

The objective of this study is to evaluate two approaches, which use different representations of the Earth’s gravity field for downward continuation (DC), for determining Helmert gravity anomalies on the geoid. The accuracy of these anomalies is validated by 1) analyzing conformity of the two approaches; and 2) converting them to geoid heights and comparing the resulting values to GPS-leveling data. The first approach (A) consists of evaluating Helmert anomalies at the topography and downward-continuing them to the geoid. The second approach (B) downward-continues refined Bouguer anomalies to the geoid and transforms them to Helmert anomalies by adding the condensed topographical effect. Approach A is sensitive to the DC because of the roughness of the Helmert gravity field. The DC effect on the geoid can reach up to 2 m in Western Canada when the Stokes kernel is used to convert gravity anomalies to geoid heights. Furthermore, Poisson’s equation for DC provides better numerical results than Moritz’s equation when the resulting geoid models are validated against the GPS-leveling. On the contrary, approach B is significantly less sensitive to the DC because of the smoothness of the refined Bouguer gravity field. In this case, the DC (Poisson’s and Moritz’s) contributes only at the decimeter level to the geoid model in Western Canada. The maximum difference between the geoid models from approaches A and B is about 5 cm in the region of interest. The differences may result from errors in the DC such as numerical instability. The standard deviations of the h−H−N for both approaches are about 8 cm at the 664 GPS-leveling validation stations in Western Canada.     

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.     

The height datum problem and the role of satellite gravity models

Regional height systems do not refer to a common equipotential surface, such as the geoid. They are usually referred to the mean sea level at a reference tide gauge. As mean sea level varies (by ±1 to 2 m) from place to place and from continent to continent each tide gauge has an unknown bias with respect to a common reference surface, whose determination is what the height datum problem is concerned with. This paper deals with this problem, in connection to the availability of satellite gravity missions data. Since biased heights enter into the computation of terrestrial gravity anomalies, which in turn are used for geoid determination, the biases enter as secondary or indirect effect also in such a geoid model. In contrast to terrestrial gravity anomalies, gravity and geoid models derived from satellite gravity missions, and in particular GRACE and GOCE, do not suffer from those inconsistencies. Those models can be regarded as unbiased. After a review of the mathematical formulation of the problem, the paper examines two alternative approaches to its solution. The first one compares the gravity potential coefficients in the range of degrees from 100 to 200 of an unbiased gravity field from GOCE with those of the combined model EGM2008, that in this range is affected by the height biases. This first proposal yields a solution too inaccurate to be useful. The second approach compares height anomalies derived from GNSS ellipsoidal heights and biased normal heights, with anomalies derived from an anomalous potential which combines a satellite-only model up to degree 200 and a high-resolution global model above 200. The point is to show that in this last combination the indirect effects of the height biases are negligible. To this aim, an error budget analysis is performed. The biases of the high frequency part are proved to be irrelevant, so that an accuracy of 5 cm per individual GNSS station is found. This seems to be a promising practical method to solve the problem.     

Geoid determination using one-step integration

A residual (high-frequency) gravimetric geoid is usually computed from geographically limited ground, sea and/or airborne gravimetric data. The mathematical model for its determination from ground gravity is based on the transformation of observed discrete values of gravity into gravity potential related to either the international ellipsoid or the geoid. The two reference surfaces are used depending on height information that accompanies ground gravity data: traditionally orthometric heights determined by geodetic levelling were used while GPS positioning nowadays allows for estimation of geodetic (ellipsoidal) heights. This transformation is usually performed in two steps: (1) observed values of gravity are downward continued to the ellipsoid or the geoid, and (2) gravity at the ellipsoid or the geoid is transformed into the corresponding potential. Each of these two steps represents the solution of one geodetic boundary-value problem of potential theory, namely the first and second or third problem. Thus two different geodetic boundary-value problems must be formulated and solved, which requires numerical evaluation of two surface integrals. In this contribution, a mathematical model in the form of a single Fredholm integral equation of the first kind is presented and numerically investigated. This model combines the solution of the first and second/third boundary-value problems and transforms ground gravity disturbances or anomalies into the harmonically downward continued disturbing potential at the ellipsoid or the geoid directly. Numerical tests show that the new approach offers an efficient and stable solution for the determination of the residual geoid from ground gravity data.     

Regional geoid of the Weddell Sea,Antarctica, from heterogeneous ground-based gravity data

We present a geoid solution for the Weddell Sea and adjacent continental Antarctic regions. There, a refined geoid is of interest, especially for oceanographic and glaciological applications. For example, to investigate the Weddell Gyre as a part of the Antarctic Circumpolar Current and, thus, of the global ocean circulation, the mean dynamic topography (MDT) is needed. These days, the marine gravity field can be inferred with high and homogeneous resolution from altimetric height profiles of the mean sea surface. However, in areas permanently covered by sea ice as well as in coastal regions, satellite altimetry features deficiencies. Focussing on the Weddell Sea, these aspects are investigated in detail. In these areas, ground-based data that have not been used for geoid computation so far provide additional information in comparison with the existing high-resolution global gravity field models such as EGM2008. The geoid computation is based on the remove–compute–restore approach making use of least-squares collocation. The residual geoid with respect to a release 4 GOCE model adds up to two meters and more in the near-coastal and continental areas of the Weddell Sea region, also in comparison with EGM2008. Consequently, the thus refined geoid serves to compute new estimates of the regional MDT and geostrophic currents.     

利用空中平均重力异常确定区域大地水准面

提出了直接利用空中平均重力异常计算区域大地水准面的方法。模拟计算的结果表明, 该方法与传统的利用地面平均空间重力异常确定的大地水准面精度相当, 但其显著优点是勿需空中重力异常的向下解析延拓, 从而可以避免延拓误差对大地水准面精化的影响。