Calibration of the accelerometers on board GRACE satellites using discrete wavelet transform

Document Type : Research Article

Authors

1 Assistant Professor, Department of Surveying Engineering, Arak University of Technology, Arak, Iran

2 Associate Professor, School of Surveying and Geospatial Engineering, College of Engineering, University of Tehran,Tehran, Iran

Abstract

The Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment (GRACE) mission and its successor, GRACE Follow-On, have been observing the Earth’s static and time-variable gravity field with unprecedented accuracy from 2002, thanks to the precision equipment used, such as very accurate ranging systems, dual-frequency GPS receivers, star cameras and highly sensitive accelerometers. The accelerometers on board of these missions provide high quality measurements of the non-gravitational forces acting on the satellites, provided that they are calibrated. In this paper, a wavelet-based detrending scheme is used to estimate drift and bias of GRACE accelerometer data. This method is applied to a simulated noisy time series and two sets of GRACE accelerometer data (recorded on January 1, 2005 and during March 2015). The results confirm the speed and ease of the proposed method due to the nature of the wavelet-based detrending scheme. The estimated bias and drift parameters have acceptable accuracies because the wavelet-based method does not require any reference value and its results are not affected by uncertainties in gravitational field modeling. Furthermore, some computational problems such as the amplification of noise during the numerical differentiation of satellite positions do not exist. In addition, the accelerometer readouts, provided in the Science Reference Frame (SRF), may be calibrated without applying any coordinate transformation.

Keywords

Main Subjects


Andreas, E. L., and Treviño, G., 1997, Using wavelets to detect trends: Journal of Atmospheric and Oceanic Technology, 14(3), 554-564.
Bettadpur, S., 2009, Recommendation for a-priori bias and scale parameters for Level-1B ACC data (version 2), GRACE tn-02.
Bezděk, A., 2010, Calibration of accelerometers aboard GRACE satellites by comparison with POD-based nongravitational accelerations: Journal of Geodynamics, 50(5), 410-423.
Case, K., Kruizinga, G., and Wu, S., 2002, GRACE Level 1B Data Product User Handbook: JPL Publication D-22027.
Chen, Y., 2007, Recovery of terrestrial water storage change from low-low satellite-to-satellite tracking: PhD. thesis, The Ohio State University.
Han, S. C., Kim, H., Yeo, I. Y., Yeh, P., Oki, T., Seo, K. W., Alsdorf, D., and Luthcke, S. B., 2009, Dynamics of surface water storage in the Amazon inferred from measurements of inter‐satellite distance change: Geophys. Res. Lett., 36(9), L09403, 1-5.
Kim, J., 2000, Simulation study of a low-low satellite-to-satellite tracking mission: PhD. thesis: University of Texas at Austin.
Kornfeld, R. P., Arnold, B. W., Gross, M. A., Dahya, N. T., Klipstein, W. M., Gath, P. F., and Bettadpur, S., 2019, GRACE-FO: The gravity recovery and climate experiment follow-on mission: Journal of Spacecraft and Rockets, 56(3), 931-951.
Lemoine, F. G., Luthcke, S. B., Rowlands, D. D., Chinn, D. S., Klosko, S. M., and Cox, C. M., 2007, The use of mascons to resolve time-variable gravity from GRACE, in Tregoning, P., Rizos, C., eds., Dynamic Planet: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg, 231-236.
Moradi, A., and Sharifi, M. A., 2016, Windowed least-squares spectral analysis of GRACE K-band range rate measurements: Applied Ecology and Environmental Research, 15(1), 429-437, .doi org/10.15666/aeer/1501_429437.
Švehla, D., and Földváry, L., 2006, From kinematic orbit determination to derivation of satellite velocity and gravity field, in Flury, J., Rummel, R., Reigber, C., Rothacher, M., Boedecker, G., Schreiber, U., eds., Observation of the Earth system from space: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg, 177-192.
Tangdamrongsub, N., Hwang, C., Shum, C. K., and Wang, L., 2012, Regional surface mass anomalies from GRACE KBR measurements: Application of L‐curve regularization and a-priori hydrological knowledge: J. Geophys. Res., Solid Earth, 117(B11).
Tapley, B. D., Bettadpur, S., Watkins, M., and Reigber, C., 2004, The gravity recovery and climate experiment: Mission overview and early results: Geophys. Res. Lett., 31(9), 1-4.
Van Helleputte, T., Doornbos, E., and Visser, P., 2009, CHAMP and GRACE accelerometer calibration by GPS-based orbit determination: Advances in Space Research, 43(12), 1890-1896.
Vielberg, K., Forootan, E., Lück, C., Löcher, A., Kusche, J., and Börger, K., 2018, Comparison of accelerometer data calibration methods used in thermospheric neutral density estimation: Annales Geophysicae, 36(3), 761-779.
Weigelt, M. L., 2007, Global and local gravity field recovery from satellite-to-satellite tracking: PhD. thesis, University of Calgary, Canada.