SWARM L2PS Dedicated Lithospheric Field Inversion Chain
Thebault, Erwan¹; Vigneron, Pierre¹; Maus, Stefan²; Chulliat, Arnaud¹; Sirol, Olivier¹; Hulot, Gauthier^1
1INSTITUT DE PHYSIQUE DU GLOBE DE PARIS, FRANCE; ²CIRES/NOAA, UNITED STATES

The forthcoming Swarm satellite mission is a constellation of three satellites dedicated to the study of the Earth's magnetic field. The unique orbital characteristics of the mission, with in particular a pair of satellites flying side by side, has prompted new efforts in data processing and modeling during its preparation phase. The European Spatial Agency (ESA) has founded a consortium of several research institutions in order to offer a number of Level-2 data products to the scientific community. In this general framework, a number of tools have been tailor-made to better recover the magnetic field contribution of the Earth's lithosphere. These tools exploit the explicit advantage of the gradient features measured by the lower pair of Swarm satellites and a regional modeling scheme that is designed to better detect the magnetic field signatures of small spatial scales. We report here on various simulations and tests carried out during the Swarm preparation phase and we demonstrate with an End-to-End simulation that these tools are now operational. The chain of processing allows generating a model of the lithospheric field that fully meets a primary scientific objective of the Swarm mission. We finally discuss the refinements we could bring during the Swarm operational phase in order to derive lithospheric field models of unprecedented spatial resolution.