Remote Sensing (Feb 2021)

The Unique Role of the Jason Geodetic Missions for high Resolution Gravity Field and Mean Sea Surface Modelling

  • Ole Baltazar Andersen,
  • Shengjun Zhang,
  • David T. Sandwell,
  • Gérald Dibarboure,
  • Walter H. F. Smith,
  • Adili Abulaitijiang

DOI
https://doi.org/10.3390/rs13040646
Journal volume & issue
Vol. 13, no. 4
p. 646

Abstract

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The resolutions of current global altimetric gravity models and mean sea surface models are around 12 km wavelength resolving 6 km features, and for many years it has been difficult to improve the resolution further in a systematic way. For both Jason 1 and 2, a Geodetic Mission (GM) has been carried out as a part of the Extension-of-Life phase. The GM for Jason-1 lasted 406 days. The GM for Jason-2 was planned to provide ground-tracks with a systematic spacing of 4 km after 2 years and potentially 2 km after 4 years. Unfortunately, the satellite ceased operation in October 2019 after 2 years of Geodetic Mission but still provided a fantastic dataset for high resolution gravity recovery. We highlight the improvement to the gravity field which has been derived from the 2 years GM. When an Extension-of-Life phase is conducted, the satellite instruments will be old. Particularly Jason-2 suffered from several safe-holds and instrument outages during the GM. This leads to systematic gaps in the data-coverage and degrades the quality of the derived gravity field. For the first time, the Jason-2 GM was “rewound” to mitigate the effect of the outages, and we evaluate the effect of “mission rewind” on gravity. With the recent successful launch of Sentinel-6 Michael Freilich (S6-MF, formerly Jason CS), we investigate the possibility creating an altimetric dataset with 2 km track spacing as this would lead to fundamental increase in the spatial resolution of global altimetric gravity fields. We investigate the effect of bisecting the ground-tracks of existing GM to create a mesh with twice the resolution rather than starting all over with a new GM. The idea explores the unique opportunity to inject Jason-3 GM into the same orbital plane as used for Jason-2 GM but bisecting the existing Jason-2 tracks. This way, the already 2-years Jason-2 GM could be used to create a 2 km grid after only 2 years of Jason-3 GM, rather than starting all over with a new GM for Jason-3.

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