Thursday, December 5, 2019

The PO.DAAC is pleased to announce the public release of the JPL Tellus GRACE and GRACE-FO Mascon Ocean, Ice, and Hydrology Equivalent Water Height Release 6.0 (RL06M) version 02 (v02) datasets.

The Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment (GRACE) and GRACE Follow-On (GRACE-FO) missions are a joint partnership between NASA and the German Research Centre for Geosciences (GFZ). Both missions use twin satellites deployed to accurately map variations in the Earth's gravity field and surface mass distribution. GRACE-FO is designed as a successor to the GRACE mission. Detailed information regarding the GRACE and GRACE-FO missions are available from the project GRACE and GRACE-FO websites and also the PO.DAAC GRACE and  GRACE-FO mission webpages.

The GRACE and GRACE-FO Monthly Mascon RL06M v02 datasets supersede the existing GRACE Mascon RL06M v01 datasets (DOI: 10.5067/TEMSC-3MJC6  and 10.5067/TEMSC-3MJ06). The v02 datasets constitute the first public release of GRACE-FO Mascon data. In addition, this update includes several processing improvements relative to v01, including updated Earth oblateness and geocenter estimates. Users are encouraged to read the release notes for a full description of the changes from v01 to v02. Both Mascon datasets provide monthly coverage on a global 0.5-degree regular lat/lon grid. The temporal coverage extends from April 2002 to present following GRACE/GRACE-FO data availability time table, and will be updated in forward data stream with maximum 60-days latency.

The datasets are described and discoverable via the PO.DAAC dataset information pages.  The dataset information pages also provide access to the technical documentation, the GRACE/GRACE-FO Mascon documents, and guidance on how to cite the data.

DOI  

 https://doi.org/10.5067/TEMSC-3JC62
 https://doi.org/10.5067/TEMSC-3MJ62

Citation: 

Watkins, M. M., D. N. Wiese, D.-N. Yuan, C. Boening, F. W. Landerer (2015), Improved methods for observing Earth's time variable mass distribution with GRACE, JGR Solid Earth, https://doi.org/10.1002/2014JB011547.

Wiese, D. N., F. W. Landerer, and M. M. Watkins (2016), Quantifying and reducing leakage errors in the JPL RL05M GRACE mascon solution, Water Resour. Res., 52, 7490–7502, https://doi.org/10.1002/2016WR019344.

Comments/Questions? Please contact podaac@podaac.jpl.nasa.gov or visit the PO.DAAC Forum.