Ocean tide effects_grace.pdfVIP

International Association of Geodesy Symposia, Vol. 13, Sideris (ed), Gravity, Geoid, and Geodynamics 2000, ? Springer Verlag, Berlin Heidelberg 2001 Ocean tide effects on GRACE gravimetry. Per Knudsen, Ole Andersen, Shfaqat Abbas Khan, and Jacob H?yer
Kort Matrikelstyrelsen, Geodetic Department, Rentemestervej 8, DK-2400 Copenhagen, Denmark
Abstract. Initial studies of the effects of ocean tides on the GRACE gravity field are. Based on the predicted accuracy estimates associated with GRACE errors in the ocean tide modeling are evaluated using gravity anomalies filtered at harmonic degrees 50 and 80 respectively. The results of the analysis show that the ocean tides and the ocean tide loading are important to consider in analysis of GRACE data. Furthermore, the loading is important to consider. The current ocean tide models are not accurate enough to correct GRACE data. Furthermore, the atmospheric tides may give significant errors in the ocean tide model if altimetry corrected for inverted barometer effects is used. To study the temporal characteristics of the ocean tidal constituents when sampled by GRACE, preliminary alias frequencies have been derived assuming a sampling of one sidereal day. Those results show that the ocean tide errors will not cancel in the GRACE monthly averaged temporal gravity fields at harmonic degrees 1-50. The S2 and the K1 terms have alias frequencies much longer than 30 days, so that they remain almost unreduced in the monthly averages.
Introduction Launching in June of 2001, the GRACE mission will accurately map variations in the Earths gravity field over its 5-year lifetime. The GRACE mission will have two identical spacecrafts flying about 220 kilometers apart in a polar orbit 500 kilometers above the Earth (Tapley, 1997; Bettadpur et al., 1999; /grace). GRACE will be able to map the Earths gravity fields by making accurate measurements of the distance between the two satellites, usi