GOCE-only spherical harmonic models of the Earth's gravitational field

Provided are the global GOCE-only spherical harmonic models of the Earth's gravitational field developed by Bucha et al. (2015).

• The key data is the kinematic orbit of the GOCE satellite spanning the period from 01 November 2009 to 11 January 2010 (the R1 period).
• The acceleration approach was used to invert the kinematic orbit into the gravity field models.
• The models were derived by spherical radial basis functions (Shannon SRBF) and subsequently they were transformed into spherical harmonics.  The transformation is exact without any approximations.
• The problematic near-zonal coefficients (polar gap) are stabilized by prior information from our own low-degree GOCE-only models, so that the final models are still GOCE-only.
• The models are estimated up to relatively high harmonic degrees (75, 100, 130) to mitigate the aliasing, but it is not recommended to use them beyond degree, say, 70 due to the adverse signal-to-noise ratio.
• The models are provided in the gfc format as defined by ICGEM.

The models have been published in Bucha, B., Bezdek, A., Sebera, J., Janak, J., 2015. Global and regional gravity field determination from GOCE kinematic orbit by means of spherical radial basis functions. Surveys in Geophysics 36, 773-801, http://doi.org/10.1007/s10712-015-9344-0