Antarctic Ice-Mass Change

Mass changes of the Antarctic Ice Sheet (AIS) observed by GRACE/GRACE-FO, relative to the long-term mean over the period 2002/04 through 2020/03, are provided in terms of the following two different Level-3 products: gridded ice-mass changes and basin-averaged ice-mass changes.

Although different algorithms are used for their generation, both data sets agree within the monthly GRACE uncertainty at basin level. Both products are corrected for Glacial Isostatic Adjustment (GIA) based on the ICE-6G_D (VM5a) model ( click here for more details ).

Further information on the AIS data products and the applied processing scheme is available here as technical note.

Gridded ice-mass changes

Time series of gridded ice-mass change per surface area (kg/m²) with a formal spatial resolution of 50km x 50km, displayed in the spatial plot. These gridded products, provided in NetCDF and GeoTIFF format, can be downloaded from the ISDC archive, either based on gravity field time series from GFZ or COST-G .

Basin-averaged ice-mass changes

Time series of storage variations in gigatons (Gt) for 25 major drainage basins of the AIS, including empirical uncertainty estimates, displayed in the time series plot. These basin average products, provided in ASCII format, can be downloaded from the ISDC archive, either based on gravity field time series from GFZ or COST-G . Alternatively, they can be directly downloaded from this site as CSV files by clicking on the download button above the time series plot. The geometries of the drainage basins are available here .

Contact:

Gridded products:

Thorben Döhne (thorben.doehne (at) tu-dresden.de)

Basin-averaged products:

Ingo Sasgen (ingo.sasgen (at) awi.de)

Citation of Data:

Level-3 products based on GFZ RL06:

Sasgen, Ingo; Groh, Andreas; Horwath, Martin, 2019:
GFZ GravIS RL06 Ice-Mass Change Products. V. 0003
GFZ Data Services, https://doi.org/10.5880/GFZ.GRAVIS_06_L3_ICE

Level-3 products based on COST-G RL01:

Sasgen, Ingo; Groh, Andreas; Horwath, Martin, 2020:
COST-G GravIS RL01 Ice-Mass Change Products. V. 0003
GFZ Data Services, https://doi.org/10.5880/COST-G.GRAVIS_01_L3_ICE