GRACE / GRACE-FO
D5. Coastal processes, sea-level, cryosphere and ocean observation scienceDefinition
Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment missions measuring mass changes.
GRACE and its successor GRACE-FO are paired satellites that measure tiny changes in the distance between them to map the Earth’s gravity field month by month, detecting how mass moves. In the ocean context they weigh the water added by melting glaciers and the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets and by changing land-water storage, supplying the mass component of the sea-level budget that altimetry alone cannot separate from thermal expansion.