The satellite-only gravity field model GOCO06s

GOCO06s is a satellite-only, global gravity field model up to degree and order 300, with secular and annual variations up to degree and order 120. It was produced by the GOCO Team (Technical University of Munich, University of Bonn, Graz University of Technology, Austrian Academy of Sciences, University of Bern) and is based on 1,160,000,000 observations from 19 satellites. The contributing satellite mission are: GOCE (TIM6 gradiometer observations), GRACE (ITSG-Grace2018s), kinematic orbits from Swarm A+B+C, TerraSAR-X, TanDEM-X, CHAMP, GRACE and GOCE, and SLR observations to LAGEOS, LAGEOS 2, Starlette, Stella, AJISAI, LARES, LARETS, Etalon 1/2 and BLITS. The combination of the individual data sources is performed on the basis of the full systems of normal equations, where the relative weighting between each constituent is determined by variance component estimation. In order to account for the polar gap of GOCE, the solution is Kaula-regularized after degree and order 150. The model is available via the ICGEM Service (Ince et al., 2019).