Approximate decorrelation and non-isotropic smoothing of time-variable GRACE-type gravity field models |
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Authors: | Jürgen Kusche |
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Institution: | (1) Delft Institute of Earth Observation and Space Systems (DEOS), Delft University of Technology, Kluyverweg 1, P.O. Box 5058, 2600 GB Delft, The Netherlands;(2) Department 1: Geodesy and Remote Sensing, Telegrafenberg, GeoForschungsZentrum Potsdam, 14473 Potsdam, Germany |
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Abstract: | We discuss a new method for approximately decorrelating and non-isotropically filtering the monthly gravity fields provided
by the gravity recovery and climate experiment (GRACE) twin-satellite mission. The procedure is more efficient than conventional
Gaussian-type isotropic filters in reducing stripes and spurious patterns, while retaining the signal magnitudes. One of the
problems that users of GRACE level 2 monthly gravity field solutions fight is the effect of increasing noise in higher frequencies.
Simply truncating the spherical harmonic solution at low degrees causes the loss of a significant portion of signal, which
is not an option if one is interested in geophysical phenomena on a scale of few hundred to few thousand km. The common approach
is to filter the published solutions, that is to convolve them with an isotropic kernel that allows an interpretation as smoothed
averaging. The downside of this approach is an amplitude bias and the fact that it neither accounts for the variable data
density that increases towards the poles where the orbits converge nor for the anisotropic error correlation structure that
the solutions exhibit. Here a relatively simple regularization procedure will be outlined, which allows one to take the latter
two effects into account, on the basis of published level 2 products. This leads to a series of approximate decorrelation
transformations applied to the monthly solutions, which enable a successive smoothing to reduce the noise in the higher frequencies.
This smoothing effect may be used to generate solutions that behave, on average over all possible directions, very close to
Gaussian-type filtered ones. The localizing and smoothing properties of our non-isotropic kernels are compared with Gaussian
kernels in terms of the kernel variance and the resulting amplitude bias for a standard signal. Examples involving real GRACE
level 2 fields as well as geophysical models are used to demonstrate the techniques. With the new method, we find that the
characteristic striping pattern in the GRACE solutions are much more reduced than Gaussian-filtered solutions of comparable
signal amplitude and root mean square. |
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Keywords: | GRACE Time-variable gravity Smoothing Decorrelation |
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