The DTU17 Global Marine Gravity Field: First Validation Results

Author(s):  
O. B. Andersen ◽  
P. Knudsen
Keyword(s):  
2021 ◽  
Vol 9 ◽  
Author(s):  
Richard Fiifi Annan ◽  
Xiaoyun Wan

A regional gravity field product, comprising vertical deflections and gravity anomalies, of the Gulf of Guinea (15°W to 5°E, 4°S to 4°N) has been developed from sea surface heights (SSH) of five altimetry missions. Though the remove-restore technique was adopted, the deflections of the vertical were computed directly from the SSH without the influence of a global geopotential model. The north-component of vertical deflections was more accurate than the east-component by almost three times. Analysis of results showed each satellite can contribute almost equally in resolving the north-component. This is attributable to the nearly northern inclinations of the various satellites. However, Cryosat-2, Jason-1/GM, and SARAL/AltiKa contributed the most in resolving the east-component. We attribute this to the superior spatial resolution of Cryosat-2, the lower inclination of Jason-1/GM, and the high range accuracy of the Ka-band of SARAL/AltiKa. Weights of 0.687 and 0.313 were, respectively, assigned to the north and east components in order to minimize their non-uniform accuracy effect on the resultant gravity anomaly model. Histogram of computed gravity anomalies compared well with those from renowned models: DTU13, SIOv28, and EGM2008. It averagely deviates from the reference models by −0.33 mGal. Further assessment was done by comparing it with a quadratically adjusted shipborne free-air gravity anomalies. After some data cleaning, observations in shallow waters, as well as some ship tracks were still unreliable. By excluding the observations in shallow waters, the derived gravity field model compares well in ocean depths deeper than 2,000 m.


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Luigi Sante Zampa ◽  
Emanuele Lodolo ◽  
Nicola Creati ◽  
Martina Busetti ◽  
Gianni Madrussani ◽  
...  

<p>In this study, we present a comparative analysis between two types of gravity data used in geophysical applications: satellite altimeter-derived gravity and sea-bottom gravity.</p><p>It is largely known that the marine gravity field derived from satellite altimetry in coastal areas is generally biased by signals back-scattered from the nearby land. As a result, the derived gravity anomalies are mostly unreliable for geophysical and geological interpretations of near-shore environments.</p><p>To quantify the errors generated by the land-reflected signals and to verify the goodness of the geologic models inferred from gravity, we compared two different altimetry models with sea-bottom gravity measurements acquired along the Italian coasts from the early 50s to the late 80s.</p><p>We focused on the Gulf of Manfredonia, located in the SE sector of the Adriatic Sea, where: (i) two different sea-bottom gravity surveys have been conducted over the years, (ii) the bathymetry is particularly flat, and (iii) seismic data revealed a prominent carbonate ridge covered by hundreds of meters of Oligocene-Quaternary sediments.</p><p>Gravity field derivatives have been used to enhance both: (i) deep geological contacts, and (ii) coastal noise. The analyses outlined a “ringing-noise effect” which causes the altimeter signal degradation up to 17 km from the coast.</p><p>Differences between the observed gravity and the gravity calculated from a geological model constrained by seismic, showed that all datasets register approximately the same patterns, associated with the Gondola Fault Zone, a major structural discontinuity traversing roughly E-W the investigated area.</p><p>This study highlights the importance of implementing gravity anomalies derived from satellite-altimetry with high-resolution near-shore data, such as the sea-bottom gravity measurements available around the Italian coasts. Such analysis may have significant applications in studying the link between onshore and offshore geological structures in transitional areas.</p>


2020 ◽  
Vol 12 (14) ◽  
pp. 2287
Author(s):  
Xiaoyun Wan ◽  
Richard Fiifi Annan ◽  
Shuanggen Jin ◽  
Xiaoqi Gong

The first Chinese altimetry satellite, Haiyang-2A (HY-2A), which was launched in 2011, has provided a large amount of sea surface heights which can be used to derive marine gravity field. This paper derived the vertical deflections and gravity disturbances using HY-2A observations for the major area of the whole Earth’s ocean from 60°S and 60°N. The results showed that the standard deviations (STD) of vertical deflections differences were 1.1 s and 3.5 s for the north component and the east component between HY-2A’s observations and those from EGM2008 and EIGEN-6C4, respectively. This indicates the accuracy of the east component was poorer than that of the north component. In order to clearly demonstrate contribution of HY-2A’s observations to gravity disturbances, reference models and the commonly used remove-restore method were not adopted in this study. Therefore, the results can be seen as ‘pure’ signals from HY-2A. Assuming the values from EGM2008 were the true values, the accuracy of the gravity disturbances was about −1.1 mGal in terms of mean value of the errors and 8.0 mGal in terms of the STD. This shows systematic errors if only HY-2A observations were used. An index of STD showed that the accuracy of HY-2A was close to the theoretical accuracy according to the vertical deflection products. To verify whether the systematic errors of gravity field were from the long wavelengths, the long-wavelength parts of HY-2A’s gravity disturbance with wavelengths larger than 500 km were replaced by those from EGM2008. By comparing with ‘pure’ HY-2A version of gravity disturbance, the accuracy of the new version products was improved largely. The systematic errors no longer existed and the error STD was reduced to 6.1 mGal.


Sensors ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 20 (9) ◽  
pp. 2465
Author(s):  
Xiaoyun Wan ◽  
Shuanggen Jin ◽  
Bo Liu ◽  
Song Tian ◽  
Weiya Kong ◽  
...  

The traditional altimetry satellite, which is based on pulse-limited radar altimeter, only measures ocean surface heights along tracks; hence, leads to poorer accuracy in the east component of the vertical deflections compared to the north component, which in turn limits the final accuracy of the marine gravity field inversion. Wide-swath altimetry using radar interferometry can measure ocean surface heights in two dimensions and, thus, can be used to compute vertical deflections in an arbitrary direction with the same accuracy. This paper aims to investigate the impact of Interferometric Radar Altimeter (InRA) errors on gravity field inversion. The error propagation between gravity anomalies and InRA measurements is analyzed, and formulas of their relationship are given. By giving a group of possible InRA parameters, numerical simulations are conducted to analyze the accuracy of gravity anomaly inversion. The results show that the accuracy of the gravity anomalies is mainly influenced by the phase errors of InRA; and the errors of gravity anomalies have a linear approximation relationship with the phase errors. The results also show that the east component of the vertical deflections has almost the same accuracy as the north component.


2008 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ole B. Andersen ◽  
P. Knudsen ◽  
P. A. M. Berry ◽  
S. Kenyon ◽  
N. Pavlis

2020 ◽  
Vol 12 (5) ◽  
pp. 802 ◽  
Author(s):  
Shengjun Zhang ◽  
Ole Baltazar Andersen ◽  
Xiangxue Kong ◽  
Hang Li

HaiYang-2A (HY-2A, where ‘Haiyang’ means ‘Ocean’ in Chinese) has provided reliable sea surface height observations for gravity with uniform ocean data coverage on a global scale for more than 8 years, particularly with denser across track sampling during the geodetic mission since March 2016. This paper aims at modeling and evaluating the regional marine gravity field at 1′×1′ resolution by incorporating HY-2A altimeter waveform data from 7 complete 168-day cycles in the geodetic mission phase. Initial evaluation indicates that, firstly, the measurements in the geodetic mission stay at a consistent accuracy level with observations at the start-of-life stage according to statistics of discrepancies at crossover points cycle by cycle. Secondly, range precision improvement can be achieved using a two-pass weighted least-squares retracker. Thirdly, a downsampling procedure combined with a low-pass filter is designed for HY-2A 20 Hz data to obtain 5 Hz measurements with enhanced precision. We calculate the 1′×1′ marine gravity field model over the South China Sea area by using the EGM2008 model as a reference field with the remove/restore method. The verifications with published models and shipborne gravimetric data show that HY-2A GM data is capable of improving marine gravity field modeling. Results show slightly higher accuracy than other models with similar input datasets but not including HY-2A. The accuracy is also compared with the latest DTU17 and SIO V27.1 model.


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