Few major points of improvement concern these future gravity missions, namely the extension of the gravity time series, improving the spatial resolution, sub-monthly temporal resolution, reducing the uncertainties, and decreasing the latency of product availability. The products of these missions will support various applications in hydrology, glaciology, oceanography, climate sciences, solid earth sciences, and geodesy.

The contribution of the Geodesy Group in this SING project is around addressing the potential added value of NGGM and MAGIC missions to hydrological Data Assimilation (DA) applications. Particularly, we will assess to what extent one can benefit higher spatial and temporal resolution, as well as lower uncertainty and more homogenised noise structure of the NGGM and MAGIC missions (compared to the GRACE-type missions) in the global hydrological DA studies. The WPs will develop DA schemes for the assimilation of NGGM and MAGIC products and provide a roadmap for adding other Earth Observation (EO) data, leading to high spatial and temporal resolution Level-4 products for NGGM and MAGIC and document their algorithms.

Our focus is on high-resolution DA, exploring the DA of future missions for flooding and discharge estimation, separation of shallow/deep soil and groundwater, and the effect of high temporal resolution on hydrological DA.

The associated researchers from Aalborg University are Professor Ehsan Forootan, Assistant Professor Maike Schumacher, Postdoc Fan Yang, and PhD Leire Retegui-Schiettekatte.