The PO.DAAC is pleased to announce the public release of the JPL GRACE Mascon Ocean, Ice and Hydrology Equivalent Water Height (hereafter, Mascon) data product, which is now available as part of the Tellus MEaSUREs collection of Earth System Data Records (ESDRs). This data product differs from other GRACE data products in that gravity anomalies have been solved for in terms of equal-area 3-degree spherical cap mass concentration functions rather than spherical harmonic coefficients, and correlated errors have been removed during the data processing via the introduction of Bayesian apriori constraints. The data product contains monthly global water storage anomalies relative to a time-mean expressed on a 0.5 by 0.5 degree (latitude by longitude) grid, although the native resolution is still limited to 3 by 3 degrees.
A user-friendly version of the data can be found here: https://podaac.jpl.nasa.gov/dataset/TELLUS_GRACE_MASCON_CRI_GRID_RL05_V1
This version of the data has implemented a Coastline Resolution Improvement
(CRI) filter to separate land and ocean mass anomalies from Mascon solutions
that span coastlines.
Expert users who wish to access the data without the implementation of the
CRI filter can find that product here: https://podaac.jpl.nasa.gov/dataset/TELLUS_GRACE_MASCON_GRID_RL05_V1
For more general information about the Mascon processing, usage guidance, and
information on auxiliary files, please visit http://grace.jpl.nasa.gov/data/get-data/jpl_global_mascons/.
For a detailed description on the Mascon algorithm, including the
mathematical derivation, implementation of geophysical constraints, and
solution validation, please see Watkins et al., 2015, DOI: 10.1002/2014JB011547.
Sincerely,
PO.DAAC User Services