The Swarm satellites were launched on November 22, 2013, and carry accelerometers and GPS receivers as part of their scientific payload. The GPS receivers do not only provide the position and time for the magnetic field measurements, but are also used for determining non-gravitational forces like drag and radiation pressure acting on the spacecraft. The accelerometers measure these forces directly, at much finer resolution than the GPS receivers, from which thermospheric neutral densities can be derived. Unfortunately, the acceleration measurements suffer from a variety of disturbances, the most prominent being slow temperature-induced bias variations and sudden bias changes. In this paper, we describe the new, improved four-stage processing that is applied for transforming the disturbed acceleration measurements into scientifically valuable thermospheric neutral densities. In the first stage, the sudden bias changes in the acceleration measurements are manually removed using a dedicated software tool. The second stage is the calibration of the accelerometer measurements against the non-gravitational accelerations derived from the GPS receiver, which includes the correction for the slow temperature-induced bias variations. The identification of validity periods for calibration and correction parameters is part of the second stage. In the third stage, the calibrated and corrected accelerations are merged with the non-gravitational accelerations derived from the observations of the GPS receiver by a weighted average in the spectral domain, where the weights depend on the frequency. The fourth stage consists of transforming the corrected and calibrated accelerations into thermospheric neutral densities. We present the first results of the processing of Swarm C acceleration measurements from June 2014 to May 2015. We started with Swarm C because its acceleration measurements contain much less disturbances than those of Swarm A and have a higher signal-to-noise ratio than those of Swarm B. The latter is caused by the ...


    Access

    Download


    Export, share and cite



    Title :

    Swarm accelerometer data processing from raw accelerations to thermospheric neutral densities



    Publication date :

    2016-01-01


    Remarks:

    Siemes , C , da Encarnacao , J D T , Doornbos , E , van den IJssel , J , Kraus , J , Peresty , R , Grunwaldt , L , Apelbaum , G , Flury , J & Olsen , P E H 2016 , ' Swarm accelerometer data processing from raw accelerations to thermospheric neutral densities ' , Earth, Planets and Space , vol. 68 , no. 1 , 92 . https://doi.org/10.1186/s40623-016-0474-5



    Type of media :

    Article (Journal)


    Type of material :

    Electronic Resource


    Language :

    English



    Classification :

    DDC:    629



    Swarm accelerometer data processing from raw accelerations to thermospheric neutral densities 2. Aeronomy Swarm Science Results after two years in Space

    Siemes, Christian / de Teixeira da Encarnação, Joao / Doornbos, Eelco et al. | BASE | 2016

    Free access

    Thermospheric neutral densities derived from Swarm accelerometer and GPS data

    Doornbos, Eelco / Encarnacao, Joao / van den IJss, Jose et al. | BASE | 2016

    Free access

    Thermospheric Densities from Analysis of 6-Year GRACE Accelerometer Data

    Cheng, Minkang / Tapley, Byron / Bettadpur, Srinivas et al. | AIAA | 2008


    Thermospheric Densities from Analysis of 6-Year GRACE Accelerometer Data

    Cheng, M. / Tapley, B. / Bettadpur, S. et al. | British Library Conference Proceedings | 2008