A novel spatial filter to reduce north–south striping noise in GRACE spherical harmonic coefficients

Abstract Prevalent north–south striping (NSS) noise in the spherical harmonic coefficient products of satellite missions gravity recovery and climate experiment greatly impedes interpretation signals. The overwhelming NSS always leads to excessive smoothing data, allowing a large room for improvement spatial resolution if this particular can be mitigated beforehand. Here, we put forward new filter that effectively remove while remaining orthogonal physical This approach overcomes limitations previous method proposed by Swenson Wahr (2006), where signal distortion was high-order coefficients were uncorrectable. is based on autocorrelation longitude direction cross-correlation latitude direction. NSS-type identified our mainly located order larger than about 20 degree beyond 30, spatially between latitudes ± 60°. After removing dominating with method, weaker before added handle residual noise. Thereby, increased amplitude damping reduced. Our coincidentally reduce outliers time series without significant trend bias, which underpins its effectiveness reliability.