Rosborough Formulation in Satellite Gravity Gradiometry

Following the launch of CHAMP, a new era was born in the gravity field determination from satellite observations. Many methods have been proposed and applied for the recovery of the Earth’s gravity field from the observations of the satellite missions CHAMP, GRACE and GOCE. This paper deals with the Rosborough formulation in gravity field modelling. This formulation is derived from the transformation of time-wise representation from the orbital into the spherical coordinate systems. Base functions of the Rosborough formulation depend on the type of the functional of the gravity field and the inclination of the orbit. Unlike the space-wise approach, the Rosborough approach can easily deal with both isotropic and non-isotropic functionals. The proposed formulation is implemented on the GOCE data in order to show its efficiency. Numerical results show that the Rosborough formulation is a powerful and efficient tool in the case of GOCE gradiometry data processing.