Sub-monthly Gravity Field Recovery from Simulated Multi-GRACE Mission Type

Monthly solutions of the current GRACE mission are affected by the aliasing problem. In fact, sub-monthly temporal sampling may reduce the temporal aliasing errors but this will be done at the cost of reduced spatial sampling. Reducing the effects of temporal aliasing can be achieved by setting two pairs of satellites in different orbital planes. In this paper, we investigate the so-called Multi-GRACE constellation to improve temporal and spatial resolution for the GRACE-type mission without deteriorating accuracy. We investigate two scenarios: the Multi-GRACE Delta M that improves the temporal sampling only and the Multi-GRACE Delta Omega that improves the spatial sampling besides the temporal one in time span of only 12 days for the hydrological signal as a time-varying gravity field component. Our findings indicate that the hydrological signal can be submonthly recovered and the aliasing errors can be reduced as well by increasing temporal resolution (sub-month) via the Multi-GRACE Delta Omega constellations.