Sensitivity analysis for future gravity satellite missions

The theme of this thesis is to investigate the sensitivity of several different formations of future satellite gravity missions. The work has three main aspects. The first, and the most important, is the development and testing of a global directional wavelet transformation as a mathematical tool to analyse sensitivity of satellite gravity mission. This is done by propagating full covariance matrices w.r.t. the spherical harmonics functions onto the directional wavelet transform. For the first time, we are able to accurately quantify the stripes that are typical for the error pattern of the GRACE gravity mission.The second aspect is the simulation of a satellite gravity formation, in order to achieve accuracy information in the form of a full covariance matrix. The third aspect involves analyzing results from the GRACE mission, which is already in orbit and has been delivering data since 2002. We compare the simulations of GRACE to the data delivered by the GRACE mission. This way, we are able to establish a relationship between the simulations and real-life data and evaluate the quality of the simulations.