Least-squares modification of extended Stokes’ formula and its second-order radial derivative for validation of satellite gravity gradiometry data

The gravity anomalies at sea level can be used to validate the satellite gravity gradiometry data. Validation of such a data is important prior to downward continuation because of amplification of the data errors through this process. In this paper the second-order radial derivative of the extended Stokes’ formula is employed and the emphasis is on least-squares modification of this formula to generate the second-order radial gradient at satellite level. Two methods in this respect are proposed: (a) modifying the second-order radial derivative of extended Stokes’ formula directly, and (b) modifying extended Stokes’ formula prior to taking the second-order radial derivative. Numerical studies show that the former method works well but the latter is very sensitive to the proper choice of the cap size of integration and degree of modification.     

A theoretical study on terrestrial gravimetric data refinement by Earth gravity models

The idea of this paper is to present estimators for combining terrestrial gravity data with Earth gravity models and produce a high‐quality source of the Earth's gravity field data through all wavelengths. To do so, integral and point‐wise estimators are mathematically developed, based on the spectral combination theory, in such a way that they combine terrestrial data with one and/or two Earth gravity models. The integral estimators are developed so that they become biased or unbiased to a priori information. For testing the quality of the estimators, their global mean square errors are generated using an Earth gravity model08 model and one of the recent products of the gravity field and steady‐state ocean circulation explorer mission. Numerical results show that the integral estimators have smaller global root mean square errors than the point‐wise ones but they are not efficient practically. The integral estimator of the biased type is the most suited due to its smallest global root mean square error comparing to the rest of the estimators. Due largely to the omission errors of Earth gravity models the point‐wise estimators are not sensitive to the Earth gravity model commission error; therefore, the use of high‐degree Earth gravity models is very influential for reduction of their root mean square errors. Also it is shown that the use of the ocean circulation explorer Earth gravity model does not significantly reduce the root mean square errors of the presented estimators in the presence of Earth gravity model08. All estimators are applied in the region of Fennoscandia and a cap size of 2° for numerical integration and a maximum degree of 2500 for generation of band‐limited kernels are found suitable for the integral estimators.     

Determination of gravity anomaly at sea level from inversion of satellite gravity gradiometric data

Gravity gradients can be used to determine the local gravity field of the Earth. This paper investigates downward continuation of all elements of the disturbing gravitational tensor at satellite level using the second-order partial derivatives of the extended Stokes formula in the local-north oriented frame to determine the gravity anomaly at sea level. It considers the inversion of each gradient separately as well as their joint inversion. Numerical studies show that the gradients T_zz, T_xx, T_yy and T_xz have similar capability of being continued downward to sea level in the presence of white noise, while the gradient T_yz is considerably worse than the others. The bias-corrected joint inversion process shows the possibility of recovering the gravity anomaly with 1 mGal accuracy. Variance component estimation is also tested to update the observation weights in the joint inversion.     

On integral approach to regional gravity field modelling from satellite gradiometric data

Solution of the gradiometric boundary value problems leads to three integral formulas. If we are satisfied with obtaining a smooth solution for the Earth’s gravity field, we can use the formulas in regional gravity field modelling. In such a case, satellite gradiometric data are integrated on a sphere at satellite level and continued downward to the disturbing potential (geoid) at sea level simultaneously. This paper investigates the gravity field modelling from a full tensor of gravity at satellite level. It studies the truncation bias of the integrals as well as the filtering of noise of data. Numerical studies show that by integrating T _zz with 1 mE noise and in a cap size of 7°, the geoid can be recovered with an error of 12 cm after the filtering process. Similarly, the errors of the recovered geoids from T _xz,yz and T _{xx-yy, 2xy} are 13 and 21 cm, respectively.     

On regularized time varying gravity field models based on grace data and their comparison with hydrological models

Determination of spherical harmonic coefficients of the Earth’s gravity field is often an ill-posed problem and leads to solving an ill-conditioned system of equations. Inversion of such a system is critical, as small errors of data will yield large variations in the result. Regularization is a method to solve such an unstable system of equations. In this study, direct methods of Tikhonov, truncated and damped singular value decomposition and iterative methods of ν, algebraic reconstruction technique, range restricted generalized minimum residual and conjugate gradient are used to solve the normal equations constructed based on range rate data of the gravity field and climate experiment (GRACE) for specific periods. Numerical studies show that the Tikhonov regularization and damped singular value decomposition methods for which the regularization parameter is estimated using quasioptimal criterion deliver the smoothest solutions. Each regularized solution is compared to the global land data assimilation system (GLDAS) hydrological model. The Tikhonov regularization with L-curve delivers a solution with high correlation with this model and a relatively small standard deviation over oceans. Among iterative methods, conjugate gradient is the most suited one for the same reasons and it has the shortest computation time.     

Spectral Combination of Spherical Gradiometric Boundary-Value Problems: A Theoretical Study

The Earth’s gravity potential can be determined from its second-order partial derivatives using the spherical gradiometric boundary-value problems which have three integral solutions. The problem of merging these solutions by spectral combination is the main subject of this paper. Integral estimators of biased- and unbiased-types are presented for recovering the disturbing gravity potential from gravity gradients. It is shown that only kernels of the biased-type integral estimators are suitable for simultaneous downward continuation and combination of gravity gradients. Numerical results show insignificant practical difference between the biased and unbiased estimators at sea level and the contribution of far-zone gravity gradients remains significant for integration. These contributions depend on the noise level of the gravity gradients at higher levels than sea. In the cases of combining the gravity gradients, contaminated with Gaussian noise, at sea and 250?km levels the errors of the estimated geoid heights are about 10 and 3 times smaller than those obtained by each integral.     

A geoid solution for airborne gravity data

Airborne gravity data is usually attached with satellite positioning of data points, which allow for the direct determination of the gravity disturbance at flight level. Assuming a suitable gridding of such data, Hotine’s modified integral formula can be combined with an Earth Gravity Model for the computation of the disturbing potential (T) at flight level. Based on T and the gravity disturbance data, we directly downward continue T to the geoid, and we present the final solution for the geoid height, including topographic corrections. It can be proved that the Taylor expansion of T converges if the flight level is at least twice the height of the topography, and the terrain potential will not contribute to the topographic correction. Hence, the simple topographic bias of the Bouguer shell yields the only topographic correction. Some numerical results demonstrate the technique used for downward continuation and topographic correction.     

Semi-vectorization: an efficient technique for synthesis and analysis of gravity gradiometry data

The harmonic synthesis and analysis of the elements of gravitational tensor can be done in few minutes if a suitable programming algorithm is used. Vectorization is an efficient technique for such processes, but the size of matrices will increase when the resolution of synthesis or analysis is high; say higher than 0.5° × 0.5°. Here, we present a technique to manage the computer memory and computational time by excluding one computational loop from the matrix products and we call this method semi-vectorization. Based on this technique, we synthesize the gravitational tensor using the EGM96 geopotential model and after that we analyze the tensor for recovering the geopotential coefficients. MATLAB codes are provided which are able to analyze 224 millions gradiometric data, corresponding to a global grid of 2.5′ × 2.5′ on a sphere in 1,093 s by a personal computer with 2 Gb RAM.