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Full catalog/TELLUS_GRAC_L3_CSR_RL06_LND_v04
TELLUS_GRAC_L3_CSR_RL06_LND_v04·vRL06v04·dataset

Monthly changes in stored water on land (GRACE)

CSR TELLUS GRACE Level-3 Monthly Land Water-Equivalent-Thickness Surface Mass Anomaly Release 6.0 version 04
hydrosphere NASA POCLOUD Level 3 netCDF-4
In plain English

What it measures. Month-to-month changes in how much water is stored across the land — combining soil moisture, snow, rivers, lakes, reservoirs, and underground groundwater — expressed as the thickness of an equivalent layer of water. It shows how each place gained or lost water compared to a long-term average.

How it's made. Built from the GRACE satellites, which detect tiny shifts in Earth's gravity caused by water moving around, then converted into monthly maps after several corrections are applied.

How & where you'd use it. Widely used to monitor droughts, groundwater depletion, melting ice, and overall water availability across regions and seasons.

What's measured

TERRESTRIAL HYDROSPHERE › WATER BUDGET › TERRESTRIAL WATER STORAGE

Coverage & cadence

  • Time span2002-04-05 → 2017-10-18
  • Measured byGRACE
  • Processing levelLevel 3
  • Spatial extent-180, -89.5, 180, 89.5
  • FormatsnetCDF-4
  • StatusCOMPLETE

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 monthly land mass grids contain water mass anomalies given as equivalent water thickness derived from GRACE & GRACE-FO time-variable gravity observations during the specified timespan, and relative to the specified time-mean reference period. The Equivalent water thickness represents the total terrestrial water storage anomalies from soil moisture, snow, surface water (incl. rivers, lakes, reservoirs etc.), as well as groundwater and aquifers. A glacial isostatic adjustment (GIA) correction has been applied, and standard corrections for geocenter (degree-1), C20 (degree-20) and C30 (degree-30) are incorporated. Post-processing filters have been applied to reduce correlated errors. Version 04 (v04) of the terrestrial water storage data uses updated and consistent C20 and Geocenter corrections (i.e., Technical Notes TN-14 and TN-13), as well as an ellipsoidal correction to account for the non-spherical shape of the Earth when mapping gravity anomalies to surface mass change. Data grids are provided in ASCII/netCDF/GeoTIFF formats. For the RL06 version, all GRACE products in the ASCII format have adopted the YAML encoding header, which is in full compliance with the PODAAC metadata best practices.

Get the data

tellus_grac_l3_csr_rl06_lnd_v04_access.py
import earthaccess
earthaccess.login(strategy="netrc")          # free Earthdata Login

results = earthaccess.search_data(
    short_name="TELLUS_GRAC_L3_CSR_RL06_LND_v04",
    version="RL06v04",
    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.