GRACE Satellite Data: Global Water Height Anomalies with Coastal Filter

Gridded monthly global water storage anomalies derived from JPL GRACE and GRACE-FO satellite gravity measurements. The data consists of 4,551 independent estimates of surface mass change on an equal-area 3-degree grid, processed using a Mascon approach and a Coastal Resolution Improvement filter to reduce signal leakage. This RL06.3Mv04 version is an updated release from NASA.

Use Cases

• Analyze global terrestrial water storage changes based on monthly water height anomalies.
• Study land-ice mass balance and glacier changes based on equivalent water thickness measurements.
• Investigate oceanographic mass variations with reduced coastline signal leakage based on the applied CRI filter.
• Apply gain factors to study continental hydrology signals at sub-mascon resolution as described in the documentation.

Strengths

• Data is derived from GRACE and GRACE-FO satellite missions, providing a global gravity field measurement source.
• The Mascon solution consists of 4,551 independent estimates, offering a structured grid for analysis.
• A Coastal Resolution Improvement filter is applied to reduce signal leakage errors across coastlines.
• The solution uses geophysical constraints to intrinsically remove correlated errors, eliminating the need for additional de-correlation.

Limitations

• Column-level documentation is absent; field semantics must be inferred after download.
• Row count is unknown, which may limit suitability assessment for specific ML tasks.

Provenance

Source

National Aeronautics and Space Administration

Collection Method

Derived from solving for monthly gravity field variations on geolocated spherical cap mass concentration functions from GRACE and GRACE-FO satellites.

Freshness

Last updated 2026-03-13 01:29:55.755218; freshness should be verified.

Geography

Global