The satellite-only gravity field model GOCO06s

GOCO06s is a satellite-only, global gravity field model up to degree and order 300, with constrained secular and annual variations up to degree and order 200. It was produced by the GOCO Team and is based on more than 1,160,000,000 observations from 19 satellites. The combination of the individual data sources is performed on the basis of the full systems of normal equations, where the relative weighting between each constituent is determined by variance component estimation. In order to account for the polar gap of GOCE, the solution is Kaula-regularized after degree and order 150. The temporal variations contain observation information up to degree and order 120 and are regularized with isotropic noise split by land/ocean masks up to degree and order 200.

GOCO (Gravity Observation Combination) is a project initiative in the frame of ESA's GOCE Data AO (project no. 4248), with the objective to compute high-accuracy and high-resolution static global gravity field models.
(Contact: R. Pail, pail@bv.tum.de) More information can be found on www.goco.eu.

Contributing institutions:
- Technical University of Munich, Institute of Astronomical and Physical
Geodesy
- University of Bonn, Institute of Geodesy and Geoinformation
- Graz University of Technology, Institute of Geodesy
- Austrian Academy of Sciences, Space Research Institute
- University of Bern, Astronomical Institute