THE STATUS OF THE GOCE HIGH-LEVEL PROCESSING FACILITY

The GOCE High-level Processing Facility (HPF) is the part of the GOCE Ground Segment which is dedicated to the scientific processing of the GOCE observations and the production of the final gravity field products provided to the end users. The final acceptance review of the HPF was recently successfully completed. During and shortly after the operational phase of the GOCE mission the HPF will systematically produce GOCE level 2 end products such as orbits and gravity field models of different kinds, derived from the novel and highly precise GOCE gradiometry observations, GPS high-low satellite-to-satellite tracking data and additional measurements. Ten European university institutes and research facilities, having complementary expertise in gravity and geodesy related science fields, together have formed the European GOCE Gravity Consortium (EGG-C), which has been contracted by ESA to develop, implement and operate the HPF throughout the whole GOCE mission lifetime. The HPF is designed and developed with the capabilities to produce on a regular basis so-called quick-look or rapid products, that are mainly of interest for the GOCE performance monitoring, as well as final and precise products, representing the official ESA GOCE level 2 products that will become available to end-users. A unique feature of the HPF is that it will implement and operate three different gravity field analysis techniques in parallel, complemented with dedicated scientific preprocessing techniques and a thorough validation procedure for the derived gravity field models before the official ESA solution will be selected out of them. In this way (scientific) users of GOCE products (e.g. oceanographers, solid Earth scientists, geodesists and others) will benefit from the optimal exploitation of the GOCE data. The paper presents an overview of the organisation and architecture of the HPF and the status of its development.