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:

自2002年以来，美国国家航空航天局（NASA）的GRACE卫星任务允许各学科领域的科学家对全球范围内地球总水储量的变化进行分析和制图。尽管原始数据向公众开放，但对于缺乏编程或其他相关领域技术背景的学者而言，浏览、操作和分析GRACE数据的过程可能显得繁琐且困难。此外，仅了解某一特定区域的总水储量变化通常不足以规划修复措施，因为无法确定储量的变化是否发生在地下水、地表水或土壤水分中（地下水估计尤为困难）。GRACE网络应用通过提供一个用户界面，不仅帮助决策者可视化GRACE任务收集的数据，还可视化各个水储量组成部分，从而弥合了技术差距。利用GLDAS Noah陆地表面模型，该应用允许用户隔离并识别构成原始GRACE数据中总水储量量的地表水、土壤水分和地下水储量的变化。这些变化的区域或大陆尺度分析也得以实现，使用户能够对其个人感兴趣的区域内的地下水、土壤水分、地表水和总水储量的变化进行汇总和分析。GRACE应用还允许用户查看和比较针对总水储量数据的不同信号处理解决方案。以此方式，GRACE应用为科学家、工程师和决策者提供了环境建模工作的共同起点，并揭示了大规模地下水模型的应用潜力。GRACE应用可通过以下链接访问：