Thermospheric neutral densities derived from Swarm accelerometer and GPS data

Over the past years, a lot of effort has been put into characterising and correcting the various disturbance signals that were found in the accelerometer data provided by the Swarm satellites. This effort was first and foremost aimed at the Swarm C along-track axis data, which seems to be the least affected and most promising data for scientific use. The goal to make the Swarm C accelerometer along-track axis data ready for further processing into level 2 thermosphere density data has now been accomplished, with the help of information on the satellite motion from the GPS tracking as well as on the attitude from the star trackers.This presentation looks into the features of scientific interest that are found in the currently available density data set, as well as makes an assessment of the density data accuracy. We assess how the current quality level of the data in combination with the correction approach, affects the possibility of determining densities from the accelerometer measurements of the Swarm A and B satellites. We also investigate the possibility of determining crosswind speeds from Swarm data.In the meantime, we have investigated the possibility of deriving thermosphere neutral density data from the Swarm GPS observations only, with a much lower temporal resolution. We analyse the differences in the data between the three Swarm satellites as well as between the accelerometer-derived and GPS-only-derived densities for Swarm C.