A least-squares method for estimating the correlated error of GRACE models

A new least-squares method is developed for estimating and removing the correlated errors (stripes) from the Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment (GRACE) and GRACE Follow-On (GRACE-FO) mission data. This method is based on a joint parametric model of the correlated errors and temporal trends in the spherical harmonic coefficients of GRACE models. Three sets of simulation data are created from the Global Land Data Assimilation System (GLDAS), the Regional Atmospheric Climate Model 2.3 (RACMO2.3) and GRACE models and used to test it. The results show that the new method improves the decorrelation method by Swenson & Wahr significantly. Its application to the release 5 (RL05) and new release 6 (RL06) spherical harmonic solutions from the Center for Space Research (CSR) at The University of Texas at Austin demonstrates its effectiveness and provides a relative assessment of the two releases. A comparison to the Swenson & Wahr and Kusche et al. methods highlights the deficiencies in past destriping methods and shows how the inclusion and decoupling of temporal trends helps to overcome them. A comparison to the CSR mascon and JPL, mascon solutions demonstrates that the new method yields global trends that have greater amplitude than those produced by the CSR RL05 mascon solution and are of comparable quality to the JPL RL06 mascon solution. Furthermore, these results are obtained without the need for a priori information, scale factors or complex regularization methods and the solutions remain in the standard form of spherical harmonics rather than discrete mascons. The latter could introduce additional discretization error when converting to the spherical harmonic model, upon which many post-processing methods and applications arc built.