CSR GRACE and GRACE-FO Portal

CSR GRACE/GRACE-FO RL06.3 Total Variation Solutions (RL0603TV)

Monthly GRACE and GRACE-FO mass-change solutions estimated with total-variation regularization to preserve sharper spatial boundaries.

CSR GRACE/GRACE-FO RL06.3 TV Grids w/ Corrections Applied

The data can be downloaded in the NetCDF format at

CSR_GRACE_GRACE-FO_RL0603_TV_all-corrections.nc

Note: These are not the CSR RL06.3 Mascon solutions. The Total Variation (TV) solutions are generated using a different inversion and regularization methodology. If you are looking for the standard CSR mascon product, please download the CSR RL06.3 Mascon Solutions.

Overview

Thank you for your interest in the GRACE and GRACE-FO RL06 Total Variation (TV) solutions from the Center for Space Research. These solutions are derived using regularized estimation with the TV penalty and no explicit spatial constraints (Jacob et al., 2026). The solutions are available in two formats:

  1. TV solutions with all the appropriate corrections applied (GAD, GIA, C20, C30, degree1, etc) in equi-angular grids, represented in units of Terrestrial Water Storage anomaly on an ellipsoidal Earth.
  2. TV solutions represented as spherical harmonic coefficients.

Acknowledgement and Citation

When using the CSR GRACE/GRACE-FO TV solutions, please acknowledge that the data was downloaded from http://www2.csr.utexas.edu/grace and cite the following:

  1. Jacob, G., Bettadpur, S.V., Save, H., Nagel, P., Wang, F., (2026), Total Variation Regularized GRACE(-FO) Inversion, Journal of Geophysical Research - Solid Earth.
    https://doi.org/10.1029/2025JB032065
  2. Jacob, G. (2026). Total variation regularized GRACE and GRACE‐FO RL06 solutions [Dataset]. The University of Texas at Austin Center for Space Research.
    https://doi.org/10.15781/p6sw-tf21

Please contact Geethu Jacob (geethu_jacob@csr.utexas.edu) for more details.

Corrections Applied on the Grids

Spherical Harmonic representation of the TV solutions

The spherical harmonic decomposition of the TV solutions represented as corrections to the meanfield (GGM05C) are provided for the expert users. The signal definition of these fields is the same as that of the RL06.3 GSM solutions represented as updates to GGM05C mean field. The estimates of the update to a mean field is referred to as GSU in the GRACE/GRACE-FO L2 handbook.

ie.   RL0603_GSU + GGM05C = RL0603_GSM

The C20 coefficient (and C30 coefficient for GRACE-FO span) replaced with values derived from TN-14 available at https://archive.podaac.earthdata.nasa.gov/podaac-ops-cumulus-docs/gracefo/open/docs/TN-14_C30_C20_GSFC_SLR.txt

These spherical harmonic fields are provided upto degree and order 720x720. Note that d/o 720 does not represent the true resolution of the fields but is only used for grid representation. This high-degree expansion is necessary to represent sharp signal boundaries without introducing ringing artifacts due to the Gibbs phenomenon.

The users can download the GRACE and GRACE-FO GSM format monthly TV solution files at http://download.csr.utexas.edu/outgoing/grace/RL0603TV/CSR_TV_RL0603_GSU

Product Highlights

  • Total Variation Regularization:
    These solutions are natively estimated as TWS anomalies in the presence of regularization in the form of the Total Variation penalty. The penalty is based on the 1-norm of the spatial gradient of the TWS anomalies. No explicit land-ocean boundary or other signal boundaries is imposed during estimation. No prior information on the spatiotemporal distribution of signals is used during estimation. The signal recovery in the solutions is driven by the information content in the data and the localization effect inherent in the 1-norm based TV penalty. Please refer to Jacob et al. (2026) for details on the TV method and the implementation used here.

  • Processing standards:
    The TV solutions are estimated with the same standards as the CSR RL06.3 Spherical harmonics solutions using GRACE Level-1 observations. Please visit the RL06 processing details page for more information.

  • No empirical filtering:
    No additional smoothing or empirical de-striping or filtering applied to these solutions after estimation.

  • Anomaly baseline:
    The GRACE and GRACE-FO anomalies reported in these solutions are relative to a 2004.0000 - 2009.999 mean baseline.

  • Resolution:
    Please note that while these solutions are estimated on a native resolution of about 120km wide cells, the true signal resolution of these solutions is limited by the band-limited nature of the GRACE/GRACE-FO data. Users must exercise caution when using these solutions in basins smaller than approximately 200,000 km2. Moreover, these solution should only be used to perform basin level time-series analysis and never for analysis at a single grid point.

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