ESA-SING — Simulated products for future gravity missions 

Abstract

The ESA-SING dataset has been created within the ESA-SING project to investigate current and future satellite gravity mission concepts. These synthetic observations support mission-impact studies within the ESA-SING project, evaluating the added value of the NGGM and MAGIC missions for scientific applications and operational services in hydrology, ocean sciences, glaciology, climate sciences, solid earth sciences, and geodesy.The ESA-SING synthetic observations are based on input models representing global mass changes over a 12-year period available from the ESA Earth System Model, incorporating realistic instrument errors and background uncertainties for tidal and non-tidal de-aliasing products. The uncertainties in simulated single polar pair missions are comparable to those in historical GRACE records, as confirmed by the consistency in barystatic sea level errors between GRACE and GRACE-C-like data.The ESA-SING dataset contains a 12-year time series of 30-day and 5-day estimates of the time-variable gravity field, together with estimates of the long-term trend and annual cycle, representing the ESM-simulated mass transport in the hydrosphere, cryosphere and Solid Earth and incorporating realistic uncertainties for each mission configuration. Simulated satellite gravimetry products are available in spherical harmonics (L2) and equivalent water height (L3) grids for three mission concepts: a single inline-pair in polar orbit (GRACE-C-like), a single pair in an inclined orbit (NGGM), and the combination of both (MAGIC). By evaluating the recoverability of time-variable mass signals across multiple temporal scales, The ESA-SING dataset yields representative error estimates for all three satellite constellations.This work provides an overview of the SING simulations and assesses the performance of the satellite configurations considered, demonstrating that the future inclined pair (NGGM) and double-pair (MAGIC) concepts reduce noise levels in time-variable gravity field retrievals compared to single-pair observations. Moreover, this contribution will provide an introduction to the ESA-SING dataset to assist potential users.