Antarctic Ice Sheet Gravimetric Mass Balance v5.2 TU Dresden ESA CCI+ Product

This dataset contains the Gravimetric Mass Balance (GMB) for the Antarctic Ice Sheet (AIS), generated by TU Dresden as part of the ESA Antarctic Ice Sheet Climate Change Initiative+ (Antarctic_Ice_Sheet_cci+). The GMB product is based on monthly snapshots of the Earth’s gravity field provided by the Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment (GRACE) and its follow-on satellite mission (GRACE-FO). The product relies on monthly gravity field solutions (L2) of release CSR RL06.3 generated at the Center for Space Research (University of Texas at Austin) and spans the period from April 2002 through December 2025. The mass change estimation is based on the tailored sensitivity kernel approach developed at TU Dresden (Groh and Horwath 2021, https://doi.org/10.3390/rs13091736). For the 11-months gap between the GRACE and GRACE-FO data, mass changes are interpolated by a dedicated gap filling method, which utilizes modelling results from the Regional Atmospheric Climate Model RACMO2.4p1 (van Dalum et al. 2024, https://doi.org/10.5194/tc-18-4065-2024) to include short-term mass variations due to fluctuations in surface mass balance. GMB products comprise mass change time series for different drainage basins (GMB Basin Product) and a times series of mass change grids covering the entire ice sheet (GMB Gridded Product). The GMB basin product provides a time series of integrated mass changes for 26 drainage basins and the aggregations of the Antarctic Peninsula, East Antarctica, West Antarctica and the entire AIS. Based on the GMB basin product, ice mass balance estimates, i.e. linear trend in the change in ice mass, were derived for all drainage basins and aggregations. The GMB gridded product comprises a time series of ice mass changes for cells of a polar-stereographic grid with a sampling of 50x50 km² covering the entire AIS. The GMB Basin Product is provided as a single ASCII file containing the time series for all basins. Mass balance estimates for all drainage basins are also available in ASCII format. Both data sets are also available combined in a single netcdf file. The GMB Gridded Product is provided in ASCII, netcdf and GeoTiff format. A format description is included in the ASCII file header and the netcdf or GeoTiff meta data. A detailed product description can be found in the Product User Guide (https://climate.esa.int/media/documents/NU-ESA-AISCCI-PUG-002_v1.1_signed.pdf). When using the data, please cite, in addition to the Zenodo citation, the following scientific publication:Groh, A. & Horwath, M. (2021). Antarctic Ice Mass Change Products from GRACE/GRACE-FO Using Tailored Sensitivity Kernels. Remote Sens., 13(9), 1736. doi:10.3390/rs13091736