CoAuthors

Zhang Shengjun (DTU Space/North Eastern University , Denmark / China); David Sandwell (Scripps Institute of Technology, USA); Gerald Dibarboure (CNES / CLS, France); Walter Smith (NOAA, USA); Adili Abulaitijiang (DTU Space, Denmark)

The Geodetic Mission (GM) of Jason-2 was planned to provide ground-tracks with a systematic spacing of 4 km after 2 years and 2 km after 4 years to increase the spatial resolution of global altimetric gravity fields. Jason-2 ceased operation after 2 years of GM but provided a fantastic dataset. We highlight and evaluate the improvement to the gravity field which has been derived from the GM. The ageing Jason-2 suffered from several safe-holds and instrument outages.
Here, we try to quantify the effect of safe-holds on marine gravity and discuss suitable approaches advising future GM like Jason-3. We evaluate the importance of attempting to “rewind” the mission to recover missing tracks. We also investigate the importance to high resolution marine gravity field determination of exploring the possibility to continue an existing GM by using the same orbital plane. The latter idea would allow bisecting the already 2-years Jason-2 GM creating a 2 km grid after 2 years of Jason-3 GM.