Gravity anomalies determined from mean sea surface model data over the Gulf of Mexico

With the improvements in the density and quality of satellite altimetry data, a high-precision and high-resolution mean sea surface model containing abundant information regarding a marine gravity field can be calculated from long-time series multi-satellite altimeter data. Therefore, in this study, a method was proposed for determining marine gravity anomalies from a mean sea surface model. Taking the Gulf of Mexico (15°–32°N, 80°–100°W) as the study area and using a removal-recovery method, the residual gridded deflections of the vertical (DOVs) are calculated by combining the mean sea surface, mean dynamic topography, and XGM2019e_2159 geoid, and then using the inverse Vening-Meinesz method to determine the residual marine gravity anomalies from the residual gridded DOVs. Finally, residual gravity anomalies are added to the XGM2019e_2159 gravity anomalies to derive marine gravity anomaly models. In this study, the marine gravity anomalies were estimated with mean sea surface models CNES_CLS15MSS, DTU21MSS, and SDUST2020MSS and the mean dynamic topography models CNES_CLS18MDT and DTU22MDT. The accuracy of the marine gravity anomalies derived by the mean sea surface model was assessed based on ship-borne gravity data. The results show that the difference between the gravity anomalies derived by DTU21MSS and CNES_CLS18MDT and those of the ship-borne gravity data is optimal. With an increase in the distance from the coast, the difference between the gravity anomalies derived by mean sea surface models and ship-borne gravity data gradually decreases. The accuracy of the difference between the gravity anomalies derived by mean sea surface models and those from ship-borne gravity data are optimal at a depth of 3–4 km. The accuracy of the gravity anomalies derived by the mean sea surface model is high.