Recovery of the logical gravity field by spherical regularization wavelets approximation and its numerical implementation

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2009-05

Authors

Shuler, Harrey Jeong

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Abstract

As an alternative to spherical harmonics in modeling the gravity field of the Earth, we built a multiresolution gravity model by employing spherical regularization wavelets in solving the inverse problem, i.e. downward propagation of the gravity signal to the Earth.s surface. Scale discrete Tikhonov spherical regularization scaling function and wavelet packets were used to decompose and reconstruct the signal. We recovered the local gravity anomaly using only localized gravity measurements at the observing satellite.s altitude of 300 km. When the upward continued gravity anomaly to the satellite altitude with a resolution 0.5° was used as simulated measurement inputs, our model could recover the local surface gravity anomaly at a spatial resolution of 1° with an RMS error between 1 and 10 mGal, depending on the topography of the gravity field. Our study of the effect of varying the data volume and altering the maximum degree of Legendre polynomials on the accuracy of the recovered gravity solution suggests that the short wavelength signals and the regions with high magnitude gravity gradients respond more strongly to such changes. When tested with simulated SGG measurements, i.e. the second order radial derivative of the gravity anomaly, at an altitude of 300 km with a 0.7° spatial resolution as input data, our model could obtain the gravity anomaly with an RMS error of 1 ~ 7 mGal at a surface resolution of 0.7° (< 80 km). The study of the impact of measurement noise on the recovered gravity anomaly implies that the solutions from SGG measurements are less susceptible to measurement errors than those recovered from the upward continued gravity anomaly, indicating that the SGG type mission such as GOCE would be an ideal choice for implementing our model. Our simulation results demonstrate the model.s potential in determining the local gravity field at a finer scale than could be achieved through spherical harmonics, i.e. less than 100 km, with excellent performance in edge detection.

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