Improving the accuracy of GRACE Earth’s gravitational field using the combination of different inclinations

In this paper, the GRACE Earth’s gravitational field complete up to degree and order 120 is recovered based on the combination of different inclinations using the energy conservation principle. The results show that because different inclinations of satellite are sensitive to the geopotential coefficients with different degrees l and orders m, the design of GRACE exploiting 89° inclination can effectively improve the accuracy of geopotential zonal harmonic coefficients. However, it is less sensitive to the geopotential tesseral harmonic coefficients. Accordingly, the second group of GRACE exploiting lower inclination is required to determine high-accurately the geopotential tesseral harmonic coefficients and cover the shortage of the single group of GRACE exploiting 89o inclination. Two groups of GRACE individually exploiting 89° + (82°–84°) inclinations are the optimal combination of the Earth’s gravitational field recovery complete up to degree and order 120. In the degree 120, the joint accuracy of cumulative geoid height based on two groups of GRACE individually exploiting 89° and 83° inclinations is averagely two times higher than the accuracy of a group of GRACE exploiting 89° inclination.