[1] The GRACE mission is designed to track changes in the Earth's gravity field for a period of five years. Launched in March 2002, the two GRACE satellites have collected nearly two years of data. A span of data available during the Commissioning Phase was used to obtain initial gravity models. The gravity models developed with this data are more than an order of magnitude better at the long and mid wavelengths than previous models. The error estimates indicate a 2-cm accuracy uniformly over the land and ocean regions, a consequence of the highly accurate, global and homogenous nature of the GRACE data. These early results are a strong affirmation of the GRACE mission concept.

Monthly gravity field estimates made by the twin Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment (GRACE) satellites have a geoid height accuracy of 2 to 3 millimeters at a spatial resolution as small as 400 kilometers. The annual cycle in the geoid variations, up to 10 millimeters in some regions, peaked predominantly in the spring and fall seasons. Geoid variations observed over South America that can be largely attributed to surface water and groundwater changes show a clear separation between the large Amazon watershed and the smaller watersheds to the north. Such observations will help hydrologists to connect processes at traditional length scales (tens of kilometers or less) to those at regional and global scales.

Warming and Melting Mass loss from the ice sheets of Greenland and Antarctica account for a large fraction of global sea-level rise. Part of this loss is because of the effects of warmer air temperatures, and another because of the rising ocean temperatures to which they are being exposed. Joughin et al. (p. 1172 ) review how ocean-ice interactions are impacting ice sheets and discuss the possible ways that exposure of floating ice shelves and grounded ice margins are subject to the influences of warming ocean currents. Estimates of the mass balance of the ice sheets of Greenland and Antarctica have differed greatly—in some cases, not even agreeing about whether there is a net loss or a net gain—making it more difficult to project accurately future sea-level change. Shepherd et al. (p. 1183 ) combined data sets produced by satellite altimetry, interferometry, and gravimetry to construct a more robust ice-sheet mass balance for the period between 1992 and 2011. All major regions of the two ice sheets appear to be losing mass, except for East Antarctica. All told, mass loss from the polar ice sheets is contributing about 0.6 millimeters per year (roughly 20% of the total) to the current rate of global sea-level rise.

The determination of the gravity model for the Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment (GRACE) is susceptible to modeling errors, measurement noise, and observability issues. The ill‐posed GRACE estimation problem causes the unconstrained GRACE RL05 solutions to have north‐south stripes. We discuss the development of global equal area mascon solutions to improve the GRACE gravity information for the study of Earth surface processes. These regularized mascon solutions are developed with a 1° resolution using Tikhonov regularization in a geodesic grid domain. These solutions are derived from GRACE information only, and no external model or data is used to inform the constraints. The regularization matrix is time variable and will not bias or attenuate future regional signals to some past statistics from GRACE or other models. The resulting Center for Space Research (CSR) mascon solutions have no stripe errors and capture all the signals observed by GRACE within the measurement noise level. The solutions are not tailored for specific applications and are global in nature. This study discusses the solution approach and compares the resulting solutions with postprocessed results from the RL05 spherical harmonic solutions and other global mascon solutions for studies of Arctic ice sheet processes, ocean bottom pressure variation, and land surface total water storage change. This suite of comparisons leads to the conclusion that the mascon solutions presented here are an enhanced representation of the RL05 GRACE solutions and provide accurate surface‐based gridded information that can be used without further processing.