Assessment of changing satellite gravity mission architectures using terrestrial gravity and GNSS-leveling data in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia

Abstract

This research investigates the effect of the ‘future’ gravity mission (FGM) architectures i.e. Bender, Helix, Pendulum, and Cartwheel up to spherical harmonics (SH) degree/order (d/o) 120/120 to improve the estimation of the gravitational field in the Saudi Arabia. For this purpose, we evaluate ground-truth gravity anomalies and GNSS/Leveling data with the satellite-based gravity models of each aforementioned FGMs. The comparison with gravity anomalies given by the FGM provides refinements of about 57 – 61 μGal with respect to (w.r.t.) those of GRACE- and GOCE-based GGMs. The comparison with GNSS/Leveling indicates that the least differences in terms of standard deviations (STD) of geoid heights are provided by the Bender-type FGM that provides the overall least STD differences of about 62.58 cm w.r.t. the GRACE- and GOCE-based GGMs, that provide STD differences of about 62.88 cm and 62.62 cm, respectively. The outcome of this study shows that implementing additional gravity information in different flight directions of the proposed FGMs (i.e along-track, cross-track, and radial) showed slight improvement (sub of a millimeter).