ICGEM Service Developments: New functionals, altimetry, new data representations and infrastructure

The International Centre for Global Earth Models (ICGEM) is one of the five services coordinated by the International Gravity Field Service (IGFS) of the International Association of Geodesy. The ICGEM Service provides improved, quality assured, and well documented global gravity field models (GGMs) and related products to the international geosciences user community. In the framework of the currently running SAMDAT (Service and Archive for Mass Distribution And mass Transport data) project, we are going to expand the ICGEM service with additional model types, new datasets and representations that are citable, enriched with metadata, and provided in a sustainable and freely accessible research data infrastructure. Consequently, SAMDAT will improve the service performance and accommodate increasing user demands by enabling a broader range of geoscientific applications, thus strengthening its contribution to interdisciplinary research.

In this conference contribution, we present results of the recent SAMDAT activities of the ICGEM Service: (i) We introduced two new gravitational functionals, namely complete Bouguer and isostatic gravity anomalies in the interactive calculation service, (ii) We implemented a new service where altimetry derived gravity data and related products are published, and a new calculation service for Mean Dynamic Topography is provided, (iii) For the calculation service, we investigated the truncation error introduced by cutting global gravity field models in the spherical harmonic domain and compared it against cutting in the ellipsoidal harmonic domain to reduce the outcome error, (iv) For a sustainable data infrastructure, we developed an editor for metadata submission according to the new metadata scheme of GGMs and related products, (v) Finally, we implemented a new website designed to meet current scientific standards while remaining accessible to both scientific and non-scientific users.

ICGEM is a demand driven service and with the achievements of the SAMDAT project, it will translate into a modern, sustainable channel that serves the geoscientific community at a wider scale.