Gravity Models from CHAMP and other Satellite Data

CHAMP spacecraft is the first of a series of new spacecraft missions that are revolutionizing our ability to model the Earth's geopotential. We report on the analysis of over 100 days of CHAMP data in 2001 and 2002, merged with tracking data of other satellites such as Jason, Topex, GFO, Starlette, Stella, Spot-2, as well as satellite altimetry. We find that the CHAMP-only component of these solutions is a significant improvement over pre-CHAMP satellite only models with respect to the high degree information expressed by the geopotential model coefficients. For example, the variance of the differences with altimeter-derived anomalies through degree 70 is 2.80 mGal(sup 2) for the CHAMP-only solution based on 87 days of data vs. 10.19 mGal(sup 2) for EGM96S. Nonetheless, in order to model properly the various resonances to which different satellites are sensitive, we must include other satellite data. We evaluate the performance of these new CHAMP derived solutions with EGM96 and the EIGEN series of solutions. We review carefully the performance of these models for altimetric satellites.