| Summary: | Time-resolved satellite gravimetry has revolutionized understanding of mass transport in the Earth system. Since 2002, the Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment (GRACE) has enabled monitoring of the terrestrial water cycle, ice sheet and glacier mass balance, sea level change and ocean bottom pressure variations, as well as understanding responses to changes in the global climate system. Initially a pioneering experiment of geodesy, the time-variable observations have matured into reliable mass transport products, allowing assessment and forecast of a number of important climate trends, and improvements in service applications such as the United States Drought Monitor. With the successful launch of the GRACE Follow-On mission, a multi-decadal record of mass variability in the Earth system is within reach. The authors acknowledge the influence of J. M. Wahr (formerly of the University of Colorado Boulder, USA) making fundamental contributions, both in theoretical concept and in measurement applications, to the success of the GRACE mission. C.D., H.D. und F.F. acknowledge funding of the development of the GRACE-Follow On Science Data System by the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF) under grant 03F0654A. I.S. acknowledges funding by the Helmholtz Climate Initiative REKLIM (Regional Climate Change), a joint research project of the Helmholtz Association of German Research Centres (HGF) and the German Research Foundation (DFG) through grant SA 1734/4-1. A.G. received funding from the NASA Cryosphere Science program. M.E.T. was supported by CSR discretionary funds. Data availability The GRACE data used in this paper are freely available from the websites of the Science Data Systems Centres. The GRACE gravity field data products (Level 2 data) as well as supporting documentation may be accessed at http://podaac.jpl.nasa.gov/grace and http://isdc.gfz-potsdam.de/grace. User-friendly, gridded maps of mass change (Level 3 data) are available from https://grace.jpl.nasa.gov/ (JPL), ...
|
|---|