How errors in the calibration of GRACE accelerometers affect the estimates of temporal gravity fields

Abstract:

Non-gravitational accelerations acting on each of the GRACE satellites are measured in the along-track, cross-track and radial directions by the accelerometers onboard each satellite. The calibration of the observed non-gravitational accelerations requires determining a scaling factor and (at least) an offset for the observations in each of the three directions. We demonstrate in this presentation how small errors in the scale factors used to calibrate the accelerometer observations affect the noise level in the estimated temporal gravity field. We performed a parameter space search to find the optimal scale factors that generated the smallest prefit range-rate residuals and found that we can model the satellite orbits without the use of any empirical parameters, whilst still being able to identify the temporal gravity field signal in the prefit KBRR residuals. We will describe some physical conditions when the satellites are in the shadow of the Earth that we use to constrain the estimates of calibration biases and scales and show how the noise level of the estimated temporal gravity field varies with and without the use of the optimal calibration values for the accelerometer observations. A similar approach will be both required and effective to calibrate the accelerometers onboard the GRACE Follow-On mission.