GOCE: Quality Management of Level 1b Data Products
Meloni, Marco¹; Bigazzi, Alberto¹; Floberghagen, Rune²; Frommknecht, Bjoern²; Mizzi, Loretta^3
1SERCO Spa, ITALY; ²ESA, ITALY; ³Telespazio Spa, ITALY

Since the launch of GOCE in March 2009 the Payload Data Ground Segment and the science teams are in charge of assessing and understanding the quality of the observations acquired by the gradiometer and satellite-to-satellite tracking payloads.
Routine operational procedures are in place for systematic data quality assessment, targeted to instruments and satellite data as well, such as Gravity Gradients (EGG), Drag-Free Control data (DFAC), Satellite-to-Satellite Tracking data (SST) and Star Tracker data (STR). Anomaly and outliers detection, gaps detection, consistency checks between Science and DFACS channels are performed systematically on all products generated by the GOCE processing Facility (PDS).
This paper details the effort that has been done in data quality analysis as well as an outlook towards the improved data quality reached with the new version of the Level 1b processors introduced in July 2011.