GOCE GPS and Accelerometer Observations and Earth's Time-varying Gravity Field
Visser, Pieter1; van der Wal, Wouter1; Bouman, Johannes2
1Delft University of Technology, NETHERLANDS; 2Deutsches Geodätisches Forschungsinstitut, GERMANY

Although designed for observing the Earth's mean gravity field at spatial resolutions down to less than 100 km, the European Space Agency (ESA) GOCE mission might be able to observe long-wavelength temporal gravity field variations as well from a combination of high-precision Satellite-to-Satellite Tracking (SST) observations by its Global Positioning System (GPS) receiver and very precise common-mode accelerometer observations. High-precision kinematic orbit solutions from the official ESA Level 2 products have been used as pseudo GPS SST observations to estimate time series of long-wavelength 20-day global gravity field solutions. These time series have been analyzed by amongst others principal component analysis and comparison with temporal gravity field solutions from the US/German GRACE mission.