This paper summarizes the activity of the chosen Polish geodetic research teams in 2015–2018 in the fields of Earth: rotation, dynamics as well as magnetic field. It has been prepared for the needs of the presentation on the 27th International Union of Geodesy and Geodynamics General Assembly, Montreal, Canada. The part concerning Earth rotation is mostly focused on the use of modelling of diurnal and subdiurnal components of Earth rotation by including low frequency components of polar motion and UT1 in the analysis, study of free oscillations in Earth rotation derived from both space-geodetic observations of polar motion and the time variation of the second degree gravitational field coefficients derived from Satellite Laser Ranging (SLR) and Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment (GRACE) observations, new methods of monitoring of Earth rotation, as well as studies on applications of the Ring Laser Gyroscope (RLG) for direct and continuous measurements of changes in Earth rotation and investigations of the hydrological excitation of polar motion. Much attention was devoted to the GRACE-derived gravity for explaining the influence of surface mass redistributions on polar motion. Monitoring of the geodynamical phenomena is divided into study on local and regional dynamics using permanent observations, investigation on tidal phenomena, as well as research on hydrological processes and sea level variation parts. Finally, the recent research conducted by Polish scientists on the Earth’s magnetic field is described.
Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment (GRACE) mission data is widely used in various fields of science. GRACE explored changes of the gravity field regularly from April 2002 to June 2017. In the following research, we examine variance of signal contained in two different formats of GRACE data: standard spherical harmonics and mass concentration blocks (so-called “mascons”) solutions, both provided in the most recent releases. For spherical harmonics-based solution, we use monthly gravity field solutions provided up to degree and order (d/o) 96 by three different computing centers, i.e. the NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), the German Research Center for Geosciences (GFZ) and the Center for Space Research (CSR). For the mass concentration blocks, we use values of total water storage provided by the CSR, JPL and the Goddard Space Flight Center (GSFC) computing centers, which we convert to spherical harmonic coefficients up to d/o 96. We show that using the anisotropic DDK3 filter to smooth the north-south stripes present in total wate storage obtained from standard spherical harmonics solution leaves more information than common isotropic Gaussian filter. In the case of mascons, GSFC solution contains much more information than the CSR and JPL releases, relevant for corresponding d/o. Differences in variance of signal arise from different background models as well as various shape and size of mascons used during processing of GRACE observations.