Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment Follow-On (GRACE-FO) Level-2 Monthly Geopotential Spherical Harmonics Center for Space Research (CSR) Release 06.2 (RL06.2), 2018-present

FOR EXPERT USE ONLY. This dataset contains estimates of the total month-by-month geopotential of the Earth, derived from the Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment Follow-On (GRACE-FO) mission measurements, produced by the German Research Centre for Geosciences (GFZ). The data are provided as spherical harmonic coefficients, averaged over approximately a month. These coefficients are derived from the intersatellite range changes between the twin spacecraft of the GRACE-FO mission. This GRACE-FO RL06.2 data is an updated version of the initial GRACE-FO RL06 and RL06.1 Level-2 data products. RL06.2 differs from RL06.1 only in the handling of GPS data set during Level-2 processing. GPS handling for RL06.2 was re-assessed due to steady degradation in low degrees during late 2022 and 2023 in RL06.1. Alterations in the processing of the GPS data were made to increase the volume of data available after editing. Additionally relative weighting between KBR and GPS was updated after June 2020 to use optimal weighting instead of capped weights for GPS used for RL06.1 solutions. The resulting RL06.2 time series shows improvement in the low degree coefficients after 2022. All GRACE-FO RL06.2 Level-2 products are fully compatible with the GRACE RL06 Level-2 fields. Refer to the mission page for more information.
GRACE-FO. 2023. GRACEFO_L2_CSR_MONTHLY_0062. Ver. 6.2. PO.DAAC, CA, USA. Dataset accessed [2024-01-11] at https://doi.org/10.5067/GFL20-MC062