GRACE-FO: Monthly Land Water Storage Anomalies Release 6.3

JPL TELLUS GRACE-FO Level-3 Monthly Land Water-Equivalent-Thickness Surface Mass Anomaly Release 6.3 version 04 provides terrestrial water storage anomaly grids derived from GRACE-FO satellite gravity observations. The data represents total water storage anomalies from soil moisture, snow, surface water, and groundwater, with applied geophysical corrections. Version 04 incorporates updated C20 and Geocenter corrections and an ellipsoidal correction, and is compatible with the legacy GRACE RL06 data.

Use Cases

• Modeling global groundwater depletion trends based on terrestrial water storage anomaly data.
• Analyzing seasonal variations in soil moisture and snowpack based on monthly water-equivalent-thickness grids.
• Tracking surface water reservoir changes based on total terrestrial water storage anomalies.
• Assessing long-term climate impacts on water resources based on time-series gravity observations.
• Validating hydrological models based on GRACE-FO-derived surface mass change data.

Strengths

• Data incorporates glacial isostatic adjustment (GIA) correction and standard corrections for geocenter, C20, and C30.
• Post-processing filters have been applied to reduce correlated errors.
• Version 04 uses updated and consistent C20 and Geocenter corrections and an ellipsoidal correction.
• Data grids are provided in multiple formats including ASCII, netCDF, and GeoTIFF.

Limitations

• Column-level documentation is absent; field semantics must be inferred after download.
• Row count is unknown, which may limit suitability assessment.
• Freshness should be verified; last metadata update was 2026-03-13.

Provenance

Source

Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) / National Aeronautics and Space Administration

Collection Method

Derived from GRACE-FO time-variable gravity observations.

Freshness

Last updated 2026-03-13 01:22:28.853096

Geography

Global