Performance and Status of the GOCE Time-Wise Gravity Field Models
Brockmann, Jan Martin¹; Höck, Eduard²; Krasbutter, Ina¹; Mayer-Gürr, Torsten³; Pail, Roland⁴; Schuh, Wolf-Dieter¹; Zehentner, Norbert^3
1Institute of Geodesy and Geoinformatio, Theoretical Geodesy, University of Bonn, GERMANY; ²Space Research Institute, Austrian Academy of Sciences, AUSTRIA; ³Institute of Theoretical Geodesy and Satellite Geodesy , TU Graz, AUSTRIA; ⁴IAPG, TU München, GERMANY

Since the launch of the European Space Agency's (ESA) Gravity field and Ocean Circulation Explorer (GOCE) satellite in 2009, four releases of the so called time-wise gravity field models were computed within the ESA funded High-level Processing Facility (HPF). As observations the gravity gradients as measured by the gradiometer and the satellite orbit measured via GPS entered the solutions. These gravity field models were released as a set of spherical harmonic coefficients and a corresponding full variance covariance matrix. As a lot of effort is put into the modeling of the original observations errors, these covariance matrix realistically presents the errors of the gravity field models.

Within this contribution we want to demonstrate the properties and the performance of the time-wise gravity field models. As these gravity field models only depend on GOCE observations, the gain of GOCE compared to other missions and other gravity field products can be clearly demonstrated. In addition, the progress made in the line of the meanwhile four releases will be presented. As this models do not depend on other information, they are proper for the use in global and local combination models, as done e.g. in the models of the GOCO series. We will give a short outlook on the upcoming, i.e. 5th release of the model.