Multiple Parameter Regularization: Numerical Solutions and Applications to the Determination of Geopotential from Precise Satellite Orbits

Kaula’s rule of thumb has been used in producing geopotential models from space geodetic measurements, including the most recent models from satellite gravity missions CHAMP. Although Xu and Rummel (Manuscr Geod 20 8–20, 1994b) suggested an alternative regularization method by introducing a number of regularization parameters, no numerical tests have ever been conducted. We have compared four methods of regularization for the determination of geopotential from precise orbits of COSMIC satellites through simulations, which include Kaula’s rule of thumb, one parameter regularization and its iterative version, and multiple parameter regularization. The simulation results show that the four methods can indeed produce good gravitational models from the precise orbits of centimetre level. The three regularization methods perform much better than Kaula’s rule of thumb by a factor of 6.4 on average beyond spherical harmonic degree 5 and by a factor of 10.2 for the spherical harmonic degrees from 8 to 14 in terms of degree variations of root mean squared errors. The maximum componentwise improvement in the root mean squared error can be up to a factor of 60. The simplest version of regularization by multiplying a positive scalar with a unit matrix is sufficient to better determine the geopotential model. Although multiple parameter regularization is theoretically attractive and can indeed eliminate unnecessary regularization for some of the harmonic coefficients, we found that it only improved its one parameter version marginally in this COSMIC example in terms of the mean squared error.