DOI 10.1007/s00190-005-0008-6 ORIGINAL ARTI CLE

Abstract Performance of a recently proposed technique for gravity field modeling has been assessed with data from the CHAMP satellite. The modeling technique is a variant of the acceleration approach. It makes use of the satellite accel-erations that are derived from the kinematic orbit with the 3-point numerical differentiation scheme. A 322-day data set with 30-s sampling has been used. Based on this, a new gravity field model – DEOS CHAMP-01C 70- is derived. The model is complete up to degree and order 70. The geoid height difference between the DEOS CHAMP-01C 70 and EIGEN-GRACE01S models is 14 cm. This is less than for two other recently published models: EIGEN-CHAMP03Sp and ITG-CHAMP01E. Furthermore, we analyze the sensi-tivity of the model to some empirically determined parame-ters (regularization parameter and the parameter that controls the frequency-dependent data weighting). We also show that inaccuracies related to non-gravitational accelerations, which are measured by the on-board accelerometer, have a minor influence on the computed gravity field model