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Full catalog/TELLUS_GLDAS-NOAH-3.3_TWS-ANOMALY_MONTHLY
TELLUS_GLDAS-NOAH-3.3_TWS-ANOMALY_MONTHLY·v3.3·dataset

Land water storage from a model, for GRACE (monthly)

Monthly gridded Global Land Data Assimilation System (GLDAS) from Noah-v3.3 land hydrology model for GRACE and GRACE-FO over nominal months
hydrosphere NASA POCLOUD Level 3 netCDF-4
In plain English

What it measures. Monthly maps of how the total amount of water stored on land changes, adding up soil moisture, snow, and water held on plants, on a 1-degree global grid.

How it's made. Produced by the GLDAS NOAH land-surface model, computed over the same days that the GRACE and GRACE-FO satellites collected data so the two can be compared directly.

How & where you'd use it. Built specifically to evaluate and interpret the GRACE satellite measurements of land water, giving researchers a model-based reference to check against.

What's measured

TERRESTRIAL HYDROSPHERE › WATER BUDGET › TERRESTRIAL WATER STORAGE

Coverage & cadence

  • Time span2002-04-04 → ongoing
  • Measured byNoah-LSM
  • Processing levelLevel 3
  • Spatial extent-180, -89.5, 180, 89.5
  • FormatsnetCDF-4
  • StatusACTIVE

What you can do with it

  • Follow rainfall, floods and surface-water extent
  • Track soil moisture and the onset of drought
  • Monitor lakes, rivers and groundwater storage
Official description

The total land water storage anomalies are aggregated from the Global Land Data Assimilation System (GLDAS) NOAH model. GLDAS outputs land water content by using numerous land surface models and data assimilation. For more information on the GLDAS project and model outputs please visit https://ldas.gsfc.nasa.gov/gldas. The aggregated land water anomalies (sum of soil moisture, snow, canopy water) provided here can be used for comparison against and evaluations of the observations of Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment (GRACE) and GRACE-FO over land. The monthly anomalies are computed over the same days during each month as GRACE and GRACE-FO data, and are provided on monthly 1 degree lat/lon grids in NetCDF format. Currently, the days included in these monthly anomaly computation are same as GRACE-FO monthly Level-2 RL06.3 JPL solutions.

Get the data

tellus_gldas-noah-3.3_tws-anomaly_monthly_access.py
import earthaccess
earthaccess.login(strategy="netrc")          # free Earthdata Login

results = earthaccess.search_data(
    short_name="TELLUS_GLDAS-NOAH-3.3_TWS-ANOMALY_MONTHLY",
    version="3.3",
    bounding_box=(-122.5, 37.2, -121.8, 37.9),  # your area (W,S,E,N)
    temporal=("2024-01-01", "2024-12-31"),       # your dates
)
files = earthaccess.open(results)   # stream straight from POCLOUD
Browsing CMR needs no login. Downloading or streaming bytes needs a free Earthdata Login + the earthaccess package.