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Mass-related excitation of polar motion: an assessment of the new RL06 GRACE gravity field models
- Source :
- Earth, Planets and Space; December 2018, Vol. 70 Issue: 1 p1-10, 10p
- Publication Year :
- 2018
-
Abstract
- The new Release-06 (RL06) Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment (GRACE) gravity field solutions are evaluated by converting them into equatorial effective angular momentum functions (so-called excitation functions) for polar motion and comparing these to respective time series based on space-geodetic observations (geodetic excitation). The same is performed for the older RL05 solutions using identical processing. Maps of equivalent water heights derived from both releases show that the signal-to-noise ratio is significantly improved in RL06. The derived polar motion excitation functions from RL05 and RL06 differ by about 15$$\%$$ % . An analysis of the contributions of different Earth subsystems revealed that the release update mainly influenced the hydrological (12$$\%$$ % ) and oceanic excitations (17$$\%$$ % ), but it has a relatively small impact on the cryospheric excitations related to Antarctica (4$$\%$$ % ) and Greenland (1$$\%$$ % ). The RL06 data from different GRACE processing centers are more consistent among each other than the previous RL05 data. Comparisons of the GRACE-based excitation functions with the geodetic and model-based oceanic excitations show that the latest release update improved the agreement by about 2 to 15 percentage points.
Details
- Language :
- English
- ISSN :
- 13438832 and 18805981
- Volume :
- 70
- Issue :
- 1
- Database :
- Supplemental Index
- Journal :
- Earth, Planets and Space
- Publication Type :
- Periodical
- Accession number :
- ejs47484642
- Full Text :
- https://doi.org/10.1186/s40623-018-0968-4