Products based on regional modelling approaches for future satellite gravity missions

Isabelle Panet(1), Annette Eicker(2), Shin-Chan Han(3), Guillaume Ramillien(4), Michael Schmidt(5), C.K. Shum(6)
(1) Institut Géographique National, Marne-la-Vallée, France
(2) Bonn University, Institute of Theoretical Geodesy, Bonn, Germany
(3) NASA GSFC, Planetary Geodynamics Laboratory, Greenbelt, Maryland, USA
(4) Géodésie Spatiale, CNRS DTP UMR 5562, OMP, Toulouse, France
(5) Deutsches Geodätisches Forschungsinstitut, München, Germany
(6) Ohio State University, Division of Geodetic Science, Columbus, Ohio,USA

For many scientific applications of satellite gravity, one needs to derive the gravity field over an area of interest with the best possible precision and resolution, and to separate a local geophysical signal under study from the other sources of variability. For that aim, regional models of the gravity field and its sources expressed in terms of equivalent water thickness have been developed over the last years by different research teams following various approaches, and applied to the GRACE data. In this presentation, we first summarize and compare the different techniques to derive regional or global/regional solutions, using harmonic localized functions or fully discrete parameterizations: splines, hybrid spherical harmonics/splines models, multiresolution representations using wavelets, mascons, grids... Then, we discuss the interest and the use of the products derived from the abovementioned approaches by direct regularized modelling of the satellite gravity measurements or by post-processing of the global solutions, for the geoscientific user’s communities.