years period) is also found from altimetry and tide gauge observations. A phase lag, related to the inter-annual frequencies of the Volga River was detected from the point-wise time-series showing level propagation from the northwest to the southeast of the sea. The Cross-correlation between the power spectrum of Volga and that of the northern-most, middle, and southern-most points within the Caspian Sea were respectively 0.63, 0.51 and 0.4 of zero-lag correlation, corroborating the influence of the Volga River. The result of PCA also shows that different parts of the Caspian Sea exhibit different amplitudes of level variations, indicating that the point-wise approach, when employing all available satellite measurements could be a suitable method for a preliminary monitoring of this inland water resource as it gives accurate local fluctuations.

No abstract

Simplification of Geopotential Perturbing Force Acting on A SatelliteOne of the aspects of geopotential models is orbit integration of satellites. The geopotential acceleration has the largest influence on a satellite with respect to the other perturbing forces. The equation of motion of satellites is a second-order vector differential equation. These equations are further simplified and developed in this study based on the geopotential force. This new expression is much simpler than the traditional one as it does not derivatives of the associated Legendre functions and the transformations are included in the equations. The maximum degree and order of the geopotential harmonic expansion must be selected prior to the orbit integration purposes. The values of the maximum degree and order of these coefficients depend directly on the satellite's altitude. In this article, behaviour of orbital elements of recent geopotential satellites, such as CHAMP, GRACE and GOCE is considered with respect to the different degree and order of geopotential coefficients. In this case, the maximum degree 116, 109 and 175 were derived for the Earth gravitational field in short arc orbit integration of the CHAMP, GRACE and GOCE, respectively considering millimeter level in perturbations.

The numerical results of downward continuation (DWC) of point and mean gravity anomalies by the Poisson integral using point, single mean, and doubly averaged kernel are examined. Correct evaluation of the integral in its innermost zone is a challenging task. To avoid instabilities, an analytical planar approximation is used in the innermost integration zone. In addition it is shown that the single mean mode has the minimum discretization error. Downward continuation of point and mean anomalies by singly and doubly averaged kernel are the same mean anomalies on the geoid.

Abstract:Planar, spherical, and ellipsoidal approximations of Poisson's integral for downward continuation (DWC) of gravity anomalies are discussed in this study. The planar approximation of Poisson integral is assessed versus the spherical and ellipsoidal approximations by examining the outcomes of DWC and finally the geoidal heights. We present the analytical solution of Poisson's kernel in the point-mean discretization model that speed up computation time 500 times faster than spherical Poisson kernel while preserving a good numerical accuracy. The new formulas are very simple and stable even for regions with very low height. It is shown that the maximum differences between spherical and planar DWC as well as planar and ellipsoidal DWC are about 6 mm and 18 mm respectively in the geoidal heights for a rough mountainous area such as Iran.