The Surface Water and Ocean Topography (SWOT) altimeter mission provides a significant opportunity to improve the accuracy of geoid gradients (GGs) and marine gravity fields. This paper presents a new method, namely LSA3, to determine the north and east ( $$\xi $$ ξ and $$\eta $$ η ) components of GGs from simulated and real SWOT data in the northern South China Sea. To fully use SWOT’s fine-scale sea surface height (SSH) meas...

The Surface Water and Ocean Topography (SWOT) mission generates dense altimetry data that, when used in geoid gradient component estimations through least-squares collocation (LSC), lead to an ill-conditioned problem. Such problems also arise in geodetic network designs. This study introduces the Tikhonov-L-curve regularization to effectively address this challenge. By pinpointing the maximum curvatures of the L-curve, we disc...

With the advancements of satellite altimeter technology and data volume, the accuracy and spatial resolution of altimeter-derived marine gravity fields have been steadily improved. Ideally, a best marine gravity field from multi-altimeter missions is one that combines all data by optimally calibrating their relative weights. To this end, we use the minimum norm quadratic unbiased estimator theory to calibrate error variances o...