Modeling of Present-Day Atmosphere and Ocean Non-Tidal De-Aliasing Errors for Future Gravity Mission Simulations

Abstract:

A realistically perturbed synthetic de-aliasing model consistent with the updated Earth System Model of the European Space Agency (Dobslaw et al., 2015) is now available for the years 1995 -- 2006. The data-set contains realizations of (i) errors at large spatial scales assessed individually for periods between 10 -- 30, 3 -- 10, and 1 -- 3 days, the S1 atmospheric tide, and sub-diurnal periods; (ii) errors at small spatial scales typically not covered by global models of atmosphere and ocean variability; and (iii) errors due to physical processes not represented in currently available de-aliasing products. The error magnitudes for each of the different frequency bands are derived from a small ensemble of four atmospheric and oceanic models.

In order to demonstrate the plausibility of the error magnitudes chosen, we perform a variance component estimation based on daily GRACE normal equations from the ITSG-Grace2014 global gravity field series recently published by the University of Graz. All 12 years of the error model are used to calculate empirical error variance-covariance matrices describing the systematic dependencies of the errors both in time and in space individually for five continental and four oceanic regions, and daily GRACE normal equations are subsequently employed to obtain pre-factors for each of those matrices. For the largest spatial scales up to d/o = 40 and periods longer than 24 h, errors prepared for the updated ESM are found to be largely consistent with noise of a similar stochastic character contained in present-day GRACE solutions. Differences and similarities identified for all of the nine regions considered will be discussed in detail during the presentation.

Dobslaw, H., I. Bergmann-Wolf, R. Dill, E. Forootan, V. Klemann, J. Kusche, and I. Sasgen (2015), The updated ESA Earth System Model for future gravity mission simulation studies, J. Geod., doi:10.1007/s00190-014-0787-8.