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Spectral formulas for the evaluation of gravitational gradients generated by upper Earth's mass components are presented in the manuscript. The spectral approach allows for numerical evaluation of global gravitational gradient fields that can be used to constrain gravitational gradients either synthesised from global gravitational models or directly measured by the spaceborne gradiometer on board of the GOCE satellite mission. Gravitational gradients generated by static atmospheric, topographic and continental ice masses are evaluated numerically based on available global models of Earth's topography, bathymetry and continental ice sheets. CRUST2.0 data are then applied for the numerical evaluation of gravitational gradients generated by mass density contrasts within soft and hard sediments, upper, middle and lower crust layers. Combined gravitational gradients are compared to disturbing gravitational gradients derived from a global gravitational model and an idealised Earth's model represented by the geocentric homogeneous biaxial ellipsoid GRS80. The methodology could be used for improved modelling of the Earth's inner structure., QC 20130214

So far the recent Earth's gravity model, EGM08, has been successfully applied for different geophysical and geodetic purposes. In this paper, we show that the computation of geoid and gravity anomaly on the reference ellipsoid is of essential importance but error propagation of EGM08 on this surface is not successful due to downward continuation of the errors. Also we illustrate that some artefacts appear in the computed geoid and gravity anomaly to lower degree and order than 2190. This means that the role of higher degree harmonics than 2160 is to remove these artefacts from the results. Consequently, EGM08 must be always used to degree and order 2190 to avoid the numerical problems., QC 20130819

The idea of this paper is to refine the terrestrial gravimetric data with the Earth's gravity models (EGMs) and produce a high quality source of gravity data. For this purpose, biased and unbiased integral estimators are presented. These estimators are used to refine gravimetric data over Fennoscandia with the ITG-GRACE2010s and GO_CONS_GCF_2_DIR_R2 EGMs, which are the recent products of the gravity field and climate experiment (GRACE) and the gravity field and steady-state ocean circulation explorer (GOCE) satellite missions. Numerical results show that the biased integral estimator has smaller global root mean square error (RMSE) than the unbiased one. Also a simple strategy is presented to down-weight the low-frequencies the terrestrial data in spectral combination. The gravity anomalies, computed by EGM08, are compared to the refined anomalies for evaluation purpose. In the case of using a cap size of 1 degrees for integration the EGM08 gravity anomalies are more correlated with the refined ones. Also the band-limited kernels can simply be generated to maximum degree of the used EGMs for both estimators. Comparisons of the combined anomalies and those of EGM08 show insignificant differences between the biased and unbiased estimators in practice. However, the biased estimator seems to be proper one for gravity data refinement due to its smaller global RMSE., QC 20130729

The orbital elements of a low Earth orbiting satellite and their velocities can be used for local determination of gravity anomaly. The important issue is to find direct relations among the anomalies and these parameters. Here, a primary theoretical study is presented for this purpose. The Gaussian equations of motion of a satellite are used to develop integral formulas for recovering the gravity anomalies. The behaviour of kernels of the integrals are investigated for a two-month simulated orbit similar to that of the Gravity field and steady-state ocean circulation explorer (GOCE) mission over Fennoscandia. Numerical investigations show that the integral formulas have neither isotropic nor well-behaved kernels. In such a case, gravity anomaly recovery is not successful due to large spatial truncation error of the integral formulas. Reformulation of the problem by combining the orbital elements and their velocities leads to an integral with a well-behaved kernel which is suitable for our purpose. Also based on these combinations some general relations among the orbital elements and their velocities are obtained which can be used for validation of orbital parameters and their velocities. (C) 2013 COSPAR., QC 20130802

Determination of spherical harmonic coefficients of the Earth's gravity field is often an ill-posed problem and leads to solving an ill-conditioned system of equations. Inversion of such a system is critical, as small errors of data will yield large variations in the result. Regularization is a method to solve such an unstable system of equations. In this study, direct methods of Tikhonov, truncated and damped singular value decomposition and iterative methods of nu, algebraic reconstruction technique, range restricted generalized minimum residual and conjugate gradient are used to solve the normal equations constructed based on range rate data of the gravity field and climate experiment (GRACE) for specific periods. Numerical studies show that the Tikhonov regularization and damped singular value decomposition methods for which the regularization parameter is estimated using quasioptimal criterion deliver the smoothest solutions. Each regularized solution is compared to the global land data assimilation system (GLDAS) hydrological model. The Tikhonov regularization with L-curve delivers a solution with high correlation with this model and a relatively small standard deviation over oceans. Among iterative methods, conjugate gradient is the most suited one for the same reasons and it has the shortest computation time., QC 20121221

The Gravity field and steady-state Ocean Circulation Explorer (GOCE) mission is dedicated to recover spherical harmonic coefficients of the Earth's gravity field to degree and order of about 250 using its satellite gradiometric data. Since these data are contaminated with coloured noise, therefore, their inversion will not be straightforward. Unsuccessful modelling of this noise will lead to biases in the harmonic coefficients presented in the Earth's gravity models (EGMs). In this study, five of the recent EGMs of GOCE such as two direct, two time-wise and one space-wise solution are used to degree and order 240 and their reliability is investigated with respect to EGM08 which is assumed as a reliable EGM. The detected unreliable coefficients and their errors are replaced by the corresponding ones from EGM08 as a combination strategy. A condition adjustment model is organised for each two corresponding coefficients of GOCE EGMs and EGM08; and errors of the GOCE EGMs are calibrated based on a scaling factor, obtained from a posteriori variance factor. When the factor is less than 2.5 it will be multiplied to the error otherwise the error of EGM08 coefficient will be considered as the calibrated one. At the end, a simple geoid estimator is presented which considers the EGMs and their errors and its outcomes are compared with the corresponding geoid heights derived from the Global Positioning System (GPS) and the levelling data (GPS/levelling data), over Fennoscandia. This comparison shows that some of the combined-calibrated GOCE EGMs are closer to the GPS/levelling data than the original ones., QC 20130628

The spherical harmonic synthesis of second-order derivatives of geopotential is a task of major concern when the spatial resolution of synthesis is high and/or a high-resolution Earth's gravity model is used. Here, a computational technique is presented for such a process. The irregular semivectorization is introduced as a vectorization technique in which one loop is excluded from matrix-vector products of mathematical models in order to speed up the computation and manage the computer memory. The proposed technique has the capability of considering heights of computation points on a regular grid. MATLAB-based software is developed, which can be used for generating gravity gradients on an ordinary personal computer. The numerical results show that irregular semivectorization significantly reduces the computation time to 1 h for synthesis of these data with global coverage and resolution of 5′×5′ on an elevation model. In addition, a numerical example is presented for testing satellite gravity gradiometry data of the recent European Space Agency satellite mission, the gravity field and steady-state ocean circulation explorer (GOCE), using an Earth's gravity model., QC 20120130

In the gravimetric approach to determine the Moho depth an isostatic hypothesis can be used. The Vening Meinesz-Moritz isostatic hypothesis is the recent theory for such a purpose. Here, this theory is further developed so that the satellite gravity gradiometry (SGG) data are used for recovering the Moho depth through a nonlinear integral inversion procedure. The kernels of its forward and inverse problems show that the inversion should be done in a larger area by 5 than the desired one to reduce the effect of the spatial truncation error of the integral formula. Our numerical study shows that the effect of this error on the recovered Moho depths can reach 6 km in Persia and it is very significant. The iterative Tikhonov regularization in a combination with either generalized cross validation or quasi-optimal criterion of estimating the regularization parameter seems to be suitable and the solution is semi-convergent up to the third iteration. Also the Moho depth recovered from the simulated SGG data will be more or less the same as that obtained from the terrestrial gravimetric data with a root mean square error of 2 km and they are statistically consistent., QC 20120411

In precise geoid modelling the combination of terrestrial gravity data and an Earth Gravitational Model (EGM) is standard. The proper combination of these data sets is of great importance, and spectral combination is one alternative utilized here. In this method data from satellite gravity gradiometry (SGG), terrestrial gravity and an EGM are combined in a least squares sense by minimizing the expected global mean square error. The spectral filtering process also allows the SGG data to be downward continued to the Earth's surface without solving a system of equations, which is likely to be ill-conditioned. Each practical formula is presented as a combination of one or two integral formulas and the harmonic series of the EGM. Numerical studies show that the kernels of the integral part of the geoid and gravity anomaly estimators approach zero at a spherical distance of about 5 degrees. Also shown (by the expected root mean square errors) is the necessity to combine EGM08 with local data, such as terrestrial gravimetric data, and/or SGG data to attain the 1-cm accuracy in local geoid determination., QC 20120411

The Earth's gravity potential can be determined from its second-order partial derivatives using the spherical gradiometric boundary-value problems which have three integral solutions. The problem of merging these solutions by spectral combination is the main subject of this paper. Integral estimators of biased- and unbiased-types are presented for recovering the disturbing gravity potential from gravity gradients. It is shown that only kernels of the biased-type integral estimators are suitable for simultaneous downward continuation and combination of gravity gradients. Numerical results show insignificant practical difference between the biased and unbiased estimators at sea level and the contribution of far-zone gravity gradients remains significant for integration. These contributions depend on the noise level of the gravity gradients at higher levels than sea. In the cases of combining the gravity gradients, contaminated with Gaussian noise, at sea and 250 km levels the errors of the estimated geoid heights are about 10 and 3 times smaller than those obtained by each integral., QC 20130107

Today, the recent global Earth's gravity model, EGM08, is successfully utilised for different purposes in geosciences. Here, EGM08 is used to compute a geoid model for Fennoscandia and since it is restricted to degree and order 2160, the higher frequencies of the geoid, or the truncation bias, is recovered directly from terrestrial gravity anomalies using a simple formula. The total topographic and atmospheric effects are computed and added to the derived geoid as well. A very simple EGM08-based non-integral geoid estimator is developed and applied for computing the geoid of Fennoscandia. The outcome of the estimator is compared with the Global Positioning System (GPS)/levelling data of Sweden, Denmark, Finland and Norway. Numerical results show the successful performance of the presented estimator as the geoid become closer to GPS/levelling data than the one computed solely with EGM08. This study will show that considering the truncation bias of EGM08 will reduce the root mean square error (RMSE) of the differences between the geoid and GPS/levelling data by about 1.3 cm and the additive topographic and atmospheric corrections by 1 cm further. It is shown that the correlations among the data have no significant influence on the estimated geoid., QC 20121207

The gravimetric model of the Moho discontinuity is usually derived based on isostatic adjustment theories considering floating crust on the viscous mantle. In computation of such a model some a priori information about the density contrast between the crust and mantle and the mean Moho depth are required. Due to our poor knowledge about them they are assumed unrealistically constant. In this paper, our idea is to improve a computed gravimetric Moho model, by the Vening Meinesz-Moritz theory, using the seismic model in Fennoscandia and estimate the error of each model through a combined adjustment with variance component estimation process. Corrective surfaces of bi-linear, bi-quadratic, bi-cubic and multi-quadric radial based function are used to model the discrepancies between the models and estimating the errors of the models. Numerical studies show that in the case of using the bi-linear surface negative variance components were come out, the bi-quadratic can model the difference better and delivers errors of 2.7 km and 1.5 km for the gravimetric and seismic models, respectively. These errors are 2.1 km and 1.6 km in the case of using the bi-cubic surface and 1 km and 1.5 km when the multi-quadric radial base function is used. The combined gravimetric models will be computed based on the estimated errors and each corrective surface., QC 20130108

One of the GOCE satellite mission goals is to study the Earth's interior structure including its crustal thickness. A gravimetric-isostatic Moho model, based on the Vening Meinesz-Moritz (VMM) theory and GOCE gradiomet-ric data, is determined beneath Iran's continental shelf and surrounding seas. The terrestrial gravimetric data of Iran are also used in a nonlinear inversion for a recovering-Moho model applying the VMM model. The newly-computed Moho models are compared with the Moho data taken from CRUST2.0. The root-mean-square (RMS) of differences between the CRUST2.0 Moho model and the recovered model from GOCE and that from the terrestrial gravimetric data are 3.8 km and 4.6 km, respectively., QC 20131008

The geoid can be used to validate the satellite gravity gradiometry data. Validation of such data is important prior to their downward continuation because of amplification of the data errors through this process. In this paper, the second-order radial derivative of Abel-Poisson's formula is modified stochastically to reduce the effect of the far-zone geoid and generate the second-order radial derivative of geopotential at 250 km level. The numerical studies over Fennoscandia show that this method yields the gradients with an error of 10 mE and when the long wavelength of geoid is removed from the estimator and restored after the computations (remove compute restore) the error will be in 1 mE level. We name this method semi-stochastic modification. The best case scenario is found when the degree of modification of the integral formula is 200 and the long wavelength geoid to degree 100 is removed and restored. In this case the geoid should have a resolution of 15' x 15' and the integration should be performed over a cap size of 3 degrees., QC 20110321

The satellite gravity gradiometric data can be used directly to recover the gravity anomaly at sea level using inversion of integral formulas. This approach suffers by the spatial truncation errors of the integrals, but these errors can be reduced by modifying the formulas. It allows us to consider smaller coverage of the satellite data over the region of recovery. In this study, we consider the second-order radial derivative (SORD) of disturbing potential (T-rr) and determine the gravity anomaly with a resolution of 1 degrees x 1 degrees at sea level by inverting the statistically modified version of SORD of extended Stokes' formula. Also we investigate the effect of the spatial truncation error on the quality of inversion considering noise of T-rr. The numerical investigations show satisfactory results when the area of T-rr coverage is the same with that of the gravity anomaly and the integral formula is modified by the biased least-squares modification. The error of recovery will be about 6 mGal after removing the regularization bias in the presence of 1 mE noise in T-rr measured on the orbit. (c) 2010 COSPAR. Published by Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved., QC 20110307

Gravity gradients can be used to determine the local gravity field of the Earth. This paper investigates downward continuation of all elements of the disturbing gravitational tensor at satellite level using the second-order partial derivatives of the extended Stokes formula in the local-north oriented frame to determine the gravity anomaly at sea level. It considers the inversion of each gradient separately as well as their joint inversion. Numerical studies show that the gradients T-zz, T-xx, T-yy and T-xz have similar capability of being continued downward to sea level in the presence of white noise, while the gradient T-yz is considerably worse than the others. The bias-corrected joint inversion process shows the possibility of recovering the gravity anomaly with 1 mGal accuracy. Variance component estimation is also tested to update the observation weights in the joint inversion., QC 20110419

The satellite gravity gradiometry (SGG) data can be used for local modelling of the Earth's gravity field. In this study, the SGG data in the local north-oriented and orbital frames are inverted to the gravity anomaly at sea level using the second-order partial derivatives of the extended Stokes formula. The emphasis is on the spatial truncation error and the kernel behaviour of the integral formulas in the aforementioned frames. The paper will show that only the diagonal elements of gravitational tensor at satellite level are suitable for recovering the gravity anomaly at sea level. Numerical studies show that the gravity anomaly can be recovered in Fennoscandia with an accuracy of about 6 mGal directly from on-orbit SGG data., QC 20110411

The Earth’s gravity field modelling is an ill-posed problem having a sensitive solution to the error of data. Satellite gravity gradiometry (SGG) is a space technique to measure the second-order derivatives of geopotential for modelling this field, but the measurements should be validated prior to use. The existing terrestrial gravity anomalies and Earth gravity models can be used for this purpose. In this paper, the second-order vertical–horizontal (VH) and horizontal–horizontal (HH) derivatives of the extended Stokes formula in the local north-oriented frame are modified using biased, unbiased and optimum types of least-squares modification. These modified integral estimators are used to generate the VH and HH gradients at 250 km level for validation purpose of the SGG data. It is shown that, unlike the integral estimator for generating the second-order radial derivative of geopotential, the system of equations from which the modification parameters are obtained is unstable for all types of modification, with large cap size and high degree, and regularization is strongly required for solving the system. Numerical studies in Fennoscandia show that the SGG data can be estimated with an accuracy of 1 mE using an integral estimator modified by a biased type least-squares modification. In this case an integration cap size of 2.5° and a degree of modification of 100 for integrating 30′ × 30′ gravity anomalies are required., QC 20120130

The effects of topographic masses on satellite gradiometric data are large and in order to reduce the magnitude of these effects some compensation mechanisms should be considered. Here we use the isostatic hypotheses of Airy-Heiskanen and the recent Vening Meinesz-Moritz for compensating these effects and to smooth the data prior to their downward continuation to gravity anomaly. The second-order partial derivatives of extended Stokes' formula are used for the continuations over a topographically rough territory like Persia. The inversions are performed and compared based on two schemes of the remove-compute-restore technique and direct downward continuation. Numerical results show that the topographic-isostatic effect based on Vening Meinesz-Mortiz's hypothesis smoothes the data better than that based on Airy-Heiskanen's hypothesis. Also the quality of inversions of the smoothed data by this mechanism is twice better than that of the nonsmoothed ones., QC 20110823

The Moho depth can be determined using seismic and/or gravimetric methods. These methods will not yield the same result as they are based on different hypotheses as well as different types, qualities and distributions of data. Here we present a new global model for the Moho computed based on a stochastic combination of seismic and gravimetric Moho models. This method employs condition equations in the spectral domain for the seismic and gravimetric models as well as degree-order variance component estimation to optimally weight the corresponding harmonics in the combination. The preliminary data for the modelling are the seismic model CRUST2.0 and a new gravimetric Moho model based on the inverse solution of the Vening Meinez-Moritz isostatic hypothesis and the global Earth Gravitational Model EGM08. Numerical results show that this method of stochastic combination agrees better with the seismic Moho model (3.6 km rms difference) than the gravimetric one. The model should be a candidate for dandifying the frequently sparsely data CRUST2.0. We expect that this way of combining seismic and gravimetric data would be even more fruitful in a regional study., QC 20110328

Estimation of variance in an ordinary adjustment model is straightforward, but if the model becomes unstable or ill-conditioned its solution and the variance of the solution will be very sensitive to the errors of observations. This sensitivity can be controlled by stabilizing methods but the results will be distorted due to stabilization. In this paper, stabilizing an unstable condition model using Tikhonov regularization, the estimations of variance of unit weight and variance components are investigated. It will be theoretically proved that the estimator of variance or variance components has not the minimum variance property when the model is stabilized, but unbiased estimation of variance is possible. A simple numerical example is provided to show the performance of the theory., Qc 20110328

The satellite gradiometric data should be validated prior to being used. One way of such a validation process is to use some integral estimators which are the second-order partial derivatives of the extended Stokes formula to regenerate the data from the gravity anomaly at the topographic surface. In this paper, we present how least-squares modification methods are used to modify such integral estimators. Our concentration will be on validation of the vertical-horizontal and horizontal-horizontal elements of the gravitational tensor at satellite level. The paper will formulate the elements of the system of equations from which the modification parameters are derived based on all types of least-squares modification. The truncation and Paul's coefficients will also be modelled., QC 20120130

The spherical Slepian functions can be used to localize the solutions of the gradiometric boundary value problems on a sphere. These functions involve spatially restricted integral products of scalar, vector and tensor spherical harmonics. This paper formulates these integrals in terms of combinations of the Gaunt coefficients and integrals of associated Legendre functions. The presented formulas for these integrals are useful in recovering the Earth's gravity field locally from the satellite gravity gradiometry data., QC 20120130

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Least-squares modification is an optimal method of modifying Stokes' formula. This method can be categorized as a generalization of the spectral combination methods as it considers the truncation error of the integral formulas in its combination process. In short, this method involves the modification parameters based on minimizing the error of terrestrial gravimetric data, satellite data and the truncation error of the integral. In this respect, the choice of the geopotential model definitely plays an important role. This paper uses the recent combined geopotential model EGM08 for generating the spectra of gravity anomaly and its error. Numerical results show that EGM08 improves least-squares modification by about 10 cm comparing to the traditional way., QC 20120130

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