Estimation of gravity noise variance and signal covariance parameters in least squares collocation with considering data resolution

Abstract

The article describes an implementation of the negative log-likelihood function in the determination of uncorrelated noise standard deviation together with the parameters of spherical signal covariance model in least squares collocation (LSC) of gravity anomalies. The correctness and effectiveness of restricted maximum likelihood (REML) estimates are fully validated by leave-one-out validation (LOO). These two complementary methods give an opportunity to inspect the parametrization of the signal and uncorrelated noise in details and can provide some guidance related to the estimation of individual parameters. The study provides the practical proof that noise variance is related with the data resolution, which is often neglected and the information on a priori noise variance is based on the measurement error. The data have been downloaded from U.S. terrestrial gravity database and resampled to enable an analysis with four different horizontal resolutions. These data are intentionally the same, as in the previous study of the same author, with the application of the planar covariance model. The aim is to compare the results from two different covariance models, which have different covariance approximation at larger distances. The most interesting outputs from this study confirm previous observations on the relations of the data resolution, a priori noise variance, signal spectrum and LSC accuracy.