The long-term continuous gravity observations obtained by the superconducting gravimeters (SG) at seven globally-distributed stations are comprehensively analyzed. After removing the signals related to the Earth's tides and variations in the Earth's rotation, the gravity residuals are used to describe the seasonal fluctuations in gravity field. Meanwhile, the gravity changes due to the air pressure loading are theoretically modeled from the measurements of the local air pressure, and those due to land water and nontidal ocean loading are also calculated according to the corresponding numerical models. The numerical results show that the gravity changes due to both the air pressure and land water loading are as large as 100×10-9 m s-2 in magnitude, and about 10×10-9 m s-2 for those due to the nontidal ocean loading in the coastal area. On the other hand, the monthly-averaged gravity variations over the area surrounding the stations are derived from the spherical harmonic coefficients of the GRACE-recovered gravity fields, by using Gaussian smoothing technique in which the radius is set to be 600 km. Com-pared the land water induced gravity variations, the SG observations after removal of tides, polar mo-tion effects, air pressure and nontidal ocean loading effects and the GRACE-derived gravity variations with each other, it is inferred that both the ground- and space-based gravity observations can effec-tively detect the seasonal gravity variations with a magnitude of 100×10-9 m s-2 induced by the land water loading. This implies that high precision gravimetry is an effective technique to validate the re-liabilities of the hydrological models.
ZHOU JiangCun1,2,3, SUN HePing1,2 & XU JianQiao1,2 1 Institute of Geodesy and Geophysics, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Wuhan 430077, China
The comparative observations of the tidal gravity in Three Gorges reservoir area, recorded with the LCR-ET20 gravimeter from Institute of Geodesy and Geophysics, Chinese Academy of Sciences and the DZW-9 gravimeter from Institute of Seismology, China Earthquake Administration, are introduced. High-accuracy tidal gravity parameters in this area are obtained, and the scale factor of the DZW-9 gravimeter is also estimated at a value of -（756.06±0.05）×10^-8 m-s^-2V^-1. The observed residuals of the corresponding instruments are investigated. Numerical results indicate that the long-term drift of the DZW-9 gravimeter appears a linear characteristic, and the observed accuracy is of the same order comparing with that of the LCR-ET20 gravimeter. The results given in the paper can provide with an effective reference model of the tidal gravity correction to the ground based and space geodesy.
The synthetic tidal parameters with high spatial resolution for gravity over China and its neighbor area are constructed with Earth＇s tidal model and ocean tide loading calculated using TPXO7 global ocean tide model as well as tidal data over China seas. The comparison between synthetic parameters and ones observed by spring gravimeters at some seismic network stations and Hong Kong station and one observed by super-conducting gravimeter at Wuhan station shows that the average differences in amplitude factors and phases are smaller than 0.005 and 0.5° respectively; and that the discrepancies between observational and synthetic parameters are dependent on gravimetric technique in that the synthetic parameters are in well agreement with the superconducting gravimetric observations. This also indicates that the synthetic result is a good estimation for tidal gravity, and the numerical results in the present paper not only can provide ground and space gravimetry such as absolute gravimetry with correction model of tidal gravity, but also provide effective tidal parameters over areas where no observation is carried out.
The Earth＇s free core nutation （FCN） is a retrograde eigenrnode which is attributed to the interaction between the solid mantle and the liquid core of the rotational elliptical Earth. This mode appears as an eigenmode of nearly diurnal free wobble （NDFW） in a terrestrial reference frame with a period of about one day （XU et al, 2001）. Therefore, the NDFW will lead to an obvious resonance enhancement in the diurnal tidal gravity observations, especially those of the tidal waves with frequencies closed to its eigenfrequency such as P1, K1, ψ1 and Ф1. The FCN resonance parameters can be retrieved accurately by high-precision tidal gravity observations, especially those recorded with the superconducting gravimeters （SG）. The Global Geodynamics Project （GGP） organized by IUGG took it as an important content for determining the FCN resonance parameters by using gravity data. However, the results are affected by many factors such as station location, background noise, the selection of the tide-generating potential tables, ocean tide models, data processing techniques and so on. In our study, the FCN parameters will be retrieved by using the SG observations at Wuhan, and the effects of the choices of various tide-generating potential tables, oceanic models and weight functions on the estimation of the FCN parameters will be discussed in detail,
