• Journal of the Korean earth science society
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• v.32 no.6
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• pp.586-594
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• 2011

Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment (GRACE), launched in April, 2002, makes it possible to monitor Earth's mass redistribution with its time-varying gravity observation. GRACE provides monthly gravity solutions as coefficients of spherical harmonics, and thus ones need to convert the gravity spectrum to gravity grids (or mass grids) via the spherical harmonics. GRACE gravity solutions, however, include spatial alias error as well as noise, which requires to suppress in order to enhance signal to noise ratio. In this study, we present the GRACE data processing procedures and introduce some applications of time-varying gravity, which are studies of terrestrial water storage changes, Antarctic and Greenland ice melting, and sea level rise. Satellite missions such as GRACE will continue up to early 2020, and they are expected to be an essential resource to understand the global climate changes.

• Korean Journal of Remote Sensing
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• v.22 no.4
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• pp.255-264
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• 2006

GRACE (Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment) is the first dedicated gravity mapping mission. Its primary measurements are the distance changes between two co-orbiting low earth satellites. GRACE is a joint development by NASA and German DLR and was launched in March 2002. GRACE improves the Earth gravity model accuracy by nearly two factor of magnitude over pre-launch models. After brief description of the GRACE primary instrument, inter-satellite ranging system, its flight status and preliminary performance evaluation is presented. Ranging system error models, which were not included in the pre-launch performance model and design specifications, are identified through analyzing the flight data. Base on this analysis, future research topics on the GRACE instrument performance analysis are discussed.

• Journal of the Korean Society for Aeronautical & Space Sciences
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• v.33 no.2
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• pp.75-83
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• 2005

NASA/DLR Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment (GRACE) mission, which consists of two co-orbiting low altitude satellites, is to measure the Earth gravity field with unprecedented accuracy. Its key instruments include inter-satellite ranging systems and three-axis accelerometers. For the preliminary design and requirements analysis, extensive instrument simulation models are developed. These modeling techniques and orbit-gravity field estimation techniques are described.

• Journal of the Korean Society for Aeronautical & Space Sciences
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• v.31 no.8
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• pp.58-68
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• 2003

Accurate estimation of the Earth gravity field plays an important role in understanding the Earth geodynamic activities. After brief discussion on the objective of the gravity estimation, dedicated satellite missions for this purpose are described. Recently launched NASA/DLR Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment (GRACE) mission, which consists of two co-orbiting low altitude satellites, is described. For the performance analysis, full numerical simulation was performed. The simulation procedure and its key instrument modelings are described. From the simulation results, a significant improvement on the Earth gravity field accuracy is expected.

• Journal of the Korean earth science society
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• v.42 no.4
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• pp.445-458
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• 2021

Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment (GRACE) gravimeter satellites observed the Earth gravity field with unprecedented accuracy since 2002. After the termination of GRACE mission, GRACE Follow-on (GFO) satellites successively observe global gravity field, but there is missing period between GRACE and GFO about one year. Many previous studies estimated terrestrial water storage (TWS) changes using hydrological models, vertical displacements from global navigation satellite system observations, altimetry, and satellite laser ranging for a continuity of GRACE and GFO data. Recently, in order to predict TWS changes, various machine learning methods are developed such as artificial neural network and multi-linear regression. Previous studies used hydrological and climate data simultaneously as input data of the learning process. Further, they excluded linear trends in input data and GRACE/GFO data because the trend components obtained from GRACE/GFO data were assumed to be the same for other periods. However, hydrological models include high uncertainties, and observational period of GRACE/GFO is not long enough to estimate reliable TWS trends. In this study, we used convolutional neural networks (CNN) method incorporating only climate data set (temperature, evaporation, and precipitation) to predict TWS variations in the missing period of GRACE/GFO. We also make CNN model learn the linear trend of GRACE/GFO data. In most river basins considered in this study, our CNN model successfully predicts seasonal and long-term variations of TWS change.

• Korean Journal of Remote Sensing
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• v.21 no.1
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• pp.51-57
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• 2005

The currently operating NASA/GFZ Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment (GRACE) mission is designed to measure small mass changes over a large spatial scale, including the mapping of continental water storage changes and other geophysical signals in the form of monthly temporal gravity field. The European Space Agency's Gravity field and steady state Ocean Circulation Explorer (GOCE) space gravity gradiometer (SGG) mission is anticipated to determine the mean Earth gravity field with an unprecedented geoid accuracy of several cm (rms) with wavelength of 130km or longer. In this paper, we present a summary of present GRACE studies for the recovery of hydrological signals in the Amazon basin using alternative processing and filtering techniques, and local inversion to enhance the temporal and spatial resolutions by two-folds or better. Simulation studies for the potential GRACE detection of slow deformations due to Nazca-South America plate convergence and glacial isostatic adjustment (GIA) signals show that these signals are at present difficult to detect without long-term data averaging and further improvement of GRACE measurement accuracy.

• Proceedings of the KSRS Conference
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• 2006.03a
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• pp.109-112
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• 2006

2002년 발사 된 GRACE (Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment)는 미국과 독일 합작으로 개발된 지구중력장 측정 전용 위성으로 동일한 궤도를 비행하는 두 개의 위성 사이 거리 변화를 측정하여 지구 중력장을 추정하는 사업이다. GRACE 위성의 핵심 관측기인 위성간 거리측정기의 원리에 대해 소개하고, 운용 현황 및 성능에 대해 소개하였다. 발사 전 성능 분석 단계에서 고려되지 못했던 거리측정기 오차 요인에 대해 분석하고, 향후 연구 방향을 제시하였다.

• Journal of the Korean earth science society
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• v.35 no.7
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• pp.537-542
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• 2014

The Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment (GRACE) has observed the Earth's mass redistribution mainly caused by the variations of groundwater, ice sheet, and sea level since its launch in April 2002. The global gravity model estimated by the GRACE observation is corrected by barometric pressure, and thus represents the change of Earth mass on the Earth's surface and below Earth's surface excluding air mass. However, the total air mass varies due to the water exchange between the Earth's surface and the atmosphere. As a result, the nominal GRACE gravity model should include the Earth's gravity spectrum associated with the total air mass variations, degree 0 and order 0 coefficients of spherical harmonics ($C_{00}$). Because the water vapor content varies mainly on a seasonal time scale, a change of $C_{00}$ (${\delta}C_{00}$) is particularly important to seasonal variations of sea level, and mass balance between northern and southern hemisphere. This result implies that ${\delta}C_{00}$ coefficients should be accounted for the examination of continental scale mass change possibly associated with the climate variations.

• Journal of the Korean Society for Aviation and Aeronautics
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• v.17 no.1
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• pp.52-57
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• 2009

One of the error sources for microwave ranging is the instability of the oscillator that drives the microwave signals. Dual one-way ranging (DOWR) minimizes the oscillator effect by combining two one-way carrier phase signals from two transmitter/receiver instrument. The DOWR is first implemented in the GRACE (Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment) satellites. Direct evaluation of the DOWR is not possible due to its extremely high accuracy. The flight performance of the GRACE DOWR is analyzed by applying several indirect methods. Comparison with the design noise level is discussed.

• Journal of Astronomy and Space Sciences
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• v.28 no.1
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• pp.63-70
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• 2011

The needs for satellite formation flying are gradually increasing to perform the advanced space missions in remote sensing and observation of the space or Earth. Formation flying in low Earth orbit can perform the scientific missions that cannot be realized with a single spacecraft. One of the various techniques of satellite formation flying is the determination of the precise baselines between the satellites within the formation, which has to be in company with the precision validation. In this paper, the baseline of Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment (GRACE) A and B was determined with the real global positioning system (GPS) measurements of GRACE satellites. And baseline precision was validated with the batch and sequential processing methods using K/Ka-band ranging system (KBR) biased range measurements. Because the proposed sequential method validate the baseline precision, removing the KBR bias with the epoch difference instead of its estimation, the validating data (KBR biased range) are independent of the data validated (GPS-baseline) and this method can be applied to the real-time precision validation. The result of sequential precision validation was 1.5~3.0 mm which is similar to the batch precision validation.