Presented by Johannes Bouman,Deutsches Geodätisches Forschungsinstitut, Germany, at the ESA-CliC Earth Observation and Arctic Science Priorities Meeting, Norway, 2015
Although the GOCE satellite gravity mission was not meant to observe the Earth’s temporal gravity field, we show that it does and may enhance mass balance estimates obtained from the GRACE satellite gravity mission. In particular, GOCE reduces the stripes that are typical to GRACE solutions and the combination of GOCE and GRACE allows estimating mass balance at basin level for Antarctica purely from satellite gravity data, which is not well possible from GRACE only. A comparison with CryoSat shows that CryoSat has the tendency to give smaller trends than GRACE/GOCE, but the differences may not be statistically significant. We also show that GOCE data reduces the stripes in GRACE solutions outside the GOCE observation time window without greatly affecting the reference epoch. Possibly GOCE may therefore be used to do the same for arbitrary GRACE monthly solutions and one would have a trade-off between bias towards GOCE time period and reducing stripes. Finally, the GOCE – in combination with GRACE – may aid lithospheric modelling, which in turn aids GIA modelling. In particular for Antarctica this may lead to a better separation of the different contribution to mass trend signals.
For more information on the meeting this was presented at, see http://www.climate-cryosphere.org/meetings/esa-arctic-2015