GRACE Global Files

Since 2002, NASA’s GRACE Satellite mission has allowed scientists of various disciplines to analyze and map the changes in Earth’s total water storage on a global scale. Although the raw data is available to the public, the process of viewing, manipulating, and analyzing the GRACE data can be tedious and difficult for those without strong technological backgrounds in programming or other related fields. Furthermore, simply knowing the changes in total water storage in a particular region typically isn’t enough to plan remediation efforts as there is no indication of whether the changes in storage are occurring in the groundwater, surface water, or soil moisture (groundwater being particularly difficult to estimate). The GRACE web-based application helps bridge the technical gap for decision makers by providing a user interface to visualize, not only the data collected from the GRACE mission, but the individual water storage components as well. Using the GLDAS Noah Land Surface Model, the application allows the user to isolate and identify the changes in surface water, soil moisture, and groundwater storage that makeup the total water storage quantities measured in the raw GRACE data. Analysis of these changes can also be performed on a regional or continental scale allowing users to aggregate and analyze the change in groundwater, soil moisture, surface water, and total water storage within their own personal regions of interest. The GRACE application also allows the user to view and compare different signal processing solutions for the total water storage data. In this way, the GRACE application offers scientists, engineers and decision makers a common starting point in their environmental modeling efforts and exposes the potential applications for a large-scale groundwater model. The GRACE application can be accessed here: