Treatment of temporal aliasing effects in the context of next generation satellite gravimetry missions

Temporal aliasing effects have a large impact on the gravity field accuracy of current gravimetry missions and are also expected to dominate the error budget of Next Generation Gravimetry Missions (NGGMs). This paper focuses on aspects concerning their treatment in the context of Low-Low Satellite-to-Satellite Tracking NGGMs. Closed-loop full-scale simulations are performed for a two-pair Bender-type Satellite Formation Flight (SFF), by taking into account error models of new generation instrument technology. The enhanced spatial sampling and error isotropy enable a further reduction of temporal aliasing errors from the processing perspective. A parameterization technique is adopted where the functional model is augmented by low-resolution gravity field solutions coestimated at short time intervals, while the remaining higher-resolution gravity field solution is estimated at a longer time interval. Fine-tuning the parameterization choices leads to significant reduction of the temporal aliasing effects. The investigations reveal that the parameterization technique in case of a Bender-type SFF can successfully mitigate aliasing effects caused by undersampling of high-frequency atmospheric and oceanic signals, since their most significant variations can be captured by daily coestimated solutions. This amounts to a “self-dealiasing” method that differs significantly from the classical dealiasing approach used nowadays for Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment processing, enabling NGGMs to retrieve the complete spectrum of Earth's nontidal geophysical processes, including, for the first time, high-frequency atmospheric and oceanic variations.