Impact of Errors in Environmental Correction on Gravity Field Recovery Using Interferometric Radar Altimeter Observations

Abstract

As a new type of altimeter, interferometric radar altimeter (InRA) has significant potential in marine gravity field recovery due to its high spatial resolution. However, errors in environmental correction on gravity field recovery using InRA observations are unclear. In this study, four kinds of these errors, including wet and dry troposphere, ionosphere, and sea state bias (SSB) correction errors, are simulated. The impact of these errors on gravity field recovery are analyzed and discussed. The results show that, among the four types of errors in environmental correction, the wet troposphere and SSB have a more significant impact on the accuracy of sea surface height computing, and the wet troposphere has the most significant impact on the accuracy of gravity field recovery. The maximum error of gravity anomaly caused by the wet troposphere residual errors is nearly 2 mGal, and the relative error of the recovered gravity anomaly is around 6.42%. We can also find that SSB has a little more significant impact than dry troposphere and ionosphere, where dry troposphere and ionosphere have an almost identical impact, on DV and GA inversion accuracy.