EIGEN-6S4 (Version 2) is a satellite-only global gravity field model from the combination of LAGEOS, GRACE and GOCE data. All spherical harmonic coefficients up to degree/order 80 are time variable. Their time variable parameters consist of drifts as well as annual and semi-annual variations per year. The time series of the time variable spherical harmonic coefficients are based on the LAGEOS-1/2 solution (1985 to 2003) and the GRACE-LAGEOS monthly gravity fields RL03-v2 (August 2002 to July 2014) from GRGS/Toulouse (Bruinsma et al. 2009).

The herein included GRACE/LAGEOS data were combined with all GOCE data which have been processed via the direct numerical approach (Pail et al. 2011). The polar gap instabilty has been overcome using the Sperical Cap Regularization (Metzler and Pail 2005). That means this model is a combination of LAGEOS/GACE with GO_CONS_GCF_2_DIR_R5 (Bruinsma et al. 2013).

Version History: This data set is an updated version of Foerste et al. (2016, http://doi.org/10.5880/icgem.2016.004) Compared to the first version, EIGEN-6S4v2 contains an improved modelling of the time variable part, in particular for C20.