The global gravity field models and related products offered in the ICGEM (International Centre for Global Earth Models) Service so far are limited with heterogeneous coverage, partial validation and documentation and they are mostly designed for geodetic use.

The ICGEM Service is constantly growing and extended with:

• the most recently available (very) high-resolution Global Gravity Models (GGMs) representing mass distributions and mass variations as shown in Figure 1a and b, respectively,
• the increasing amount of time variable monthly gravity field series representing mass redistributions on the Earth surface, and
• other developments such as improved model representations and wide range of interdisciplinary applications in geodesy, geophysics, hydrology, oceanography, glaciology and climatology.

In this context, the SAMDAT project funded by the DFG (German Research Foundation) aims to increase the performance of the ICGEM service and to meet the growing needs of the users. The improvements consist of two aspects:

• Scientific and technical expansion via modernising and upgrading the existing database with new and interoperable platforms, additional and reformed research data and metadata,
• Calculation and visualisation services that the scientific community and society have a great interest on.

As summarised in Figure 2, the overall objective of the SAMDAT project is to expand the service for improved and quality assured, well documented GGMs and related products with additional types of datasets and data representations that are enriched with metadata and provided in a sustainable and freely accessible research data infrastructure. General requirements of future needs rely on the FAIR (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, Reusable) Principles for research data. The objectives of the upgraded ICGEM Service infrastructure are closely in line with other establishments in terms of systematic management of research data, their backup, discovery and accessibility. As being a science driven data service, ICGEM will be rebuilt and integrated with the NFDI4Earth (National Research Data Infrastructure (NFDI) on national level. On international level, it will be linked to the European Open Science Cloud (EOSC), and other International Association of Geodesy services with the aim of serving worldwide users. Such a platform will make the quality assured gravity related data and products exchangeable and supports education, science, and society.

The SAMDAT project is funded over three years (2024-2027) by the German Research Foundation (DFG) within its Scientific Library Services and Information Systems Program at research institutions in Germany for “Information Infrastructures for Research Data” (DFG grand No. 527258067).

Literatur:

Ince, E. S., Barthelmes, F., Reißland, S., Elger, K., Förste, C., Flechtner, F., and Schuh, H. (2019): ICGEM – 15 years of successful collection and distribution of global gravitational models, associated services, and future plans, Earth Syst. Sci. Data, 11, 647–674, https://doi.org/10.5194/essd-11-647-2019.