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Abstract:
Being part of the GRACE/GRACE-FO Science Data System, the GFZ German Research Centre for Geosciences is one of the official Level-2 processing centers routinely providing monthly gravity models. These models are used by a wide variety of geoscientists to infer mass changes mainly at the Earth’s surface. Currently, the operationally processed monthly gravity fields are still based on release 6 (RL06) standards, but developments in view of a reprocessed and improved GFZ RL07 time series are already ongoing. Most of these improvements have been developed within the Research Unit “New Refined Observations of Climate Change from Spaceborne Gravity Missions” (NEROGRAV) funded by the German Research Foundation DFG. After a successful first phase, the second three years phase of NEROGRAV has started at the beginning of this year.
Regarding an advanced gravity field processing strategy for RL07, the main focus is on an optimized stochastic modelling of:
(1) instrument errors for the main observations (K-band/LRI ranging, GPS, and accelerometer), and
(2) background model errors for ocean tides and non-tidal atmosphere and ocean de-aliasing (AOD), making use of respective variance-covariance matrices.
This presentation provides an overview of the main outcomes of the advanced processing strategies. Details on the applied stochastic modelling approaches will be discussed. Preliminary monthly gravity field results will be presented and compared to current GFZ RL06 solutions.
