EGU General Assembly 2012, Vienna, Austria Quality assessment of sub-Nyquist recovery from future gravity satellite missions

Two sampling theorems mainly govern the space-time sampling of a satellite-mission: (i) Heisenberg uncertainty theorem which states the product of spatial resolution and time resolution is constant, and (ii) the Colombo-Nyquist rule (CNR), requires the number of satellite revolution in a time interval at least twice of the maximum spherical harmonic degree which is aimed to be detected. These two facts necessitate to employ more than one satellite mission to improve the temporal and spatial resolutions simultaneously. Moreover, several studies have shown that measuring other observable than the along-track inline GRACE measurement improves the quality of the retrieval field, although there are some technical concerns with their implementations. Here, we assess the quality of short time recoveries when the number of samples is smaller than what is required by CNR