GRACE/GRACE-FO RL07 Mascon solutions from CSR

The GRACE-FO mission, which will conclude its seven-year orbital mission in May 2025, has significantly advanced the scientific legacy of the original GRACE mission, launched in 2002. By delivering continuous, highly accurate gravity field measurements, GRACE-FO has expanded our knowledge of key Earth system processes, supporting essential research in areas such as climate change, hydrology, oceanography, the cryosphere, and solid Earth science.

Both GRACE and GRACE-FO mission data is currently undergoing reprocessing for the upcoming RL07 release. The reprocessing is expected to enhance data quality through improvements in both L1 and L2 processing. This paper presents preliminary findings from the latest GRACE(-FO) mascon solutions developed by The Center for Space Research (CSR) at The University of Texas at Austin, using the reprocessed L1 data along with refinements in L2 processing. The RL07 mascon approach builds on the success of the CSR RL06 solutions and incorporating total variation (TV) regularization to reduce signal leakage between adjacent basins. The study assesses the quality of these new mascon gravity field solutions, comparing them against independent datasets and model predictions to evaluate their accuracy in the geo-spatial domain.