Combined observables in different inter-satellite line-of-sight directions from simulated satellite gravity mission architectures for retrieving total water storage - regional case study: the Nile River Basin

Numerous studies for improving gravity field determination from future gravity missions beyond the GRACE/GRACE-FO missions have been proposed during the last decade. In this contribution, full-scale simulated observations of four satellite missions, namely Bender-, Cartwheel-, Helix- and Pendulum-type, in addition to GRACE-FO as a reference mission will be used to retrieve the total water storage over the Nile River Basin (NRB). The findings show a superiority of investigated configurations in retrieving the total water storage (TWS) w.r.t. the GRACE-FO mission. Moreover, the Bender-type provides improved global TWS recovery showing the least standard deviations (STD) of about 3.43cm in terms of equivalent water heights (EWH) (up to d/o 80). The Pendulum, Cartwheel and Helix missions provide STD of about 6.34cm, 8.35cm and 5.78cm in terms of EWH, respectively. In addition, the Bender-type provides improved local TWS recovery over the NRB without any distortion w.r.t. both the "simulated" and "real" GRACE-FO solutions.