Global marine gravity field from the ERS‐1 and Geosat geodetic mission altimetry

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Abstract
Satellite altimetry from the Geosat and the ERS‐I Geodetic Missions provide altimeter data with very dense spatial coverage. Therefore the gravity field may be recovered in great detail. As neighboring ground tracks are very closely distributed, cross‐track variations in the sea surface heights are extremely sensitive to sea surface variability. To avoid errors in the gravity field caused by such effects, sea surface variability needs to be carefully eliminated from the observations. Initially, a careful removal of gross errors and outliers was performed, and the tracks were fitted individually to a geoid model and crossover adjusted using bias and tilt. Subsequently, sea surface heights were gridded using local collocation in which residual ocean variability was considered. The conversion of the heights into gravity anomalies was carried out using the fast Fourier transform (FFT). In this process, filtering was done in the spectral domain to avoid the so‐called “orange skin” characteristics. Comparison with marine gravity was finally carried out in three different regions of the Earth to evaluate the accuracy of the global marine gravity field from ERS‐1 and Geosat.