GRACE Monthly Mass Grids - Global Mascons

NASA/GRACE/MASS_GRIDS/MASCON
Dataset Availability
2002-03-31T00:00:00Z–2017-05-22T00:00:00
Dataset Provider
Earth Engine Snippet
ee.ImageCollection("NASA/GRACE/MASS_GRIDS/MASCON")
Tags
grace gravity jpl mascon mass nasa tellus water

Description

GRACE Tellus Monthly Mass Grids provides monthly gravitational anomalies relative to a 2004-2010 time-mean baseline. The data contained in this dataset are units of "Equivalent Water Thickness" which represent the deviations of mass in terms of vertical extent of water in centimeters. See the provider's Monthly Mass Grids Overview for more details.

The GRACE Tellus (GRCTellus) Global Mascon dataset is based on Level-1 GRACE observations and processed at NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL).

This dataset uses a-priori constraints in space and time to estimate global, monthly gravity fields in terms of equal-area 3°x3° spherical cap mass concentration (mascon) functions to minimize the effect of measurement errors. No additional empirical destriping filter has been applied to the data. This results in better S/N ratios of the mascon fields compared to the conventional spherical-harmonic solutions.

Note

  • Mascons which lie on coastlines contain mixed land and ocean signals. A version of this dataset with the Coastline Resolution Improvement (CRI) filter applied to separate the land and ocean portions of mass within each land/ocean mascon in a post-processing step. This dataset is available at NASA/GRACE/MASS_GRIDS/MASCON_CRI.

  • The data are represented on a 1/2 degree lon-lat grid, but they represent the 3x3 degree equal-area caps, which is the current native resolution of JPL-RL05M.

Bands

Resolution
55660 meters

Bands

Name Units Min Max Description
lwe_thickness cm -370.43* 139.04*

Equivalent liquid water thickness in centimeters.
uncertainty 0.29* 31.1*

1-sigma uncertainty for each 3-degree mascon estimate. The provided estimates of uncertainty are regarded to be conservative. See the provider's Error & Uncertainty Estimates section
* estimated min or max value

Terms of Use

Terms of Use

All NASA-produced data from the GRACE mission is made freely available for the public to use. When using any of the GRCTellus data, please add an acknowledgment: "GRACE land are available at https://grace.jpl.nasa.gov, supported by the NASA MEaSUREs Program." and cite with the citations provided.

Citations

Citations:

  • D.N. Wiese. 2015. GRACE monthly global water mass grids NETCDF RELEASE 5.0. Ver. 5.0. PO.DAAC, CA, USA.. Dataset accessed [YYYY-MM-DD] at https://doi.org/10.5067/TEMSC-OCL05.

  • Watkins, M. M., D. N. Wiese, D.-N. Yuan, C. Boening, and F. W. Landerer (2015), Improved methods for observing Earth's time variable mass, mass distribution with GRACE using spherical cap mascons, J. Geophys. Res Solid Earth, 120, doi: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, doi:10.1002/2016WR019344.

DOIs

Explore with Earth Engine

Code Editor (JavaScript)

var dataset = ee.ImageCollection('NASA/GRACE/MASS_GRIDS/MASCON')
                  .filter(ee.Filter.date('2016-08-01', '2016-08-30'));
var equivalentWaterThickness = dataset.select('lwe_thickness');
var equivalentWaterThicknessVis = {
  min: -25.0,
  max: 25.0,
};
Map.setCenter(6.746, 46.529, 2);
Map.addLayer(
    equivalentWaterThickness, equivalentWaterThicknessVis,
    'Equivalent Water Thickness');
GRACE Tellus Monthly Mass Grids provides monthly gravitational anomalies relative to a 2004-2010 time-mean baseline. The data contained in this dataset are units of "Equivalent Water Thickness" which represent the deviations of mass in terms of vertical extent of water in centimeters. See the provider's Monthly Mass Grids Overview for …
NASA/GRACE/MASS_GRIDS/MASCON, grace,gravity,jpl,mascon,mass,nasa,tellus,water
2002-03-31T00:00:00Z/2017-05-22T00:00:00
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