Towards diagnostic tools for analysing Swarm data through model retrievals

The objective of the Swarm mission is to provide the best ever survey of the geomagnetic field and its temporal dependency, and to gain new insights into improving our knowledge of the Earth’s interior and climate. The Swarm concept consists of a constellation of three satellites in three different polar orbits between 300 and 550 km altitude. Goal of the current study is to build tools and to analyze datasets, in order to allow a fast diagnosis of the Swarm system performance in orbit during the commission phase and operations of the spacecraft. The effects on the reconstruction of the magnetic field resulting from various error sources are investigated. By using a specially developed software package closed loop simulations are performed aiming at different scenarios. We start from the simple noise-free case and move on to more complex and realistic situations which include attitude errors, position errors and data gaps. The magnitude of the different error sources is kept variable so that we not only compare the impact of different error sources, but investigate also the effects on the magnetic field reconstruction for different noise levels. Further extension of this approach will allow to test the influence of ionospheric residual signal or the impact of data selection on the lithospheric retrieval. Initially, the study considers one satellite and emphasises on the lithospheric field reconstruction, but in a second step it is extended to a realistic Swarm constellation of three satellites. Thus it gives us the possibility to compare the single- and the multi-satellite gradient approach showing the various advantages of the multi-satellite setup. Once the study is carried out conclusions about how the errors interfere and propagate into the models can be drawn.