GSTM / SPP Colloquium

Joint GRACE Science Team Meeting and
DFG SPP1257 Final Colloquium
German Research Centre for Geosciences (GFZ)
17-19 September 2012

BACKGROUND

The GRACE mission celebrated its 10th anniversary in flight on March 17, 2012, with the satellites, instruments and ground systems still working well. The GRACE science operations concept for the remainder of the mission is driven by the project decision to operate the spacecrafts in a manner that maximizes the remaining lifetime, within constraints imposed by available battery capacity, such that the longest possible climate data record is available from GRACE. Following a comprehensive re-analysis, which was completed in March 2012, the GRACE Science Data System has released a homogeneously reprocessed time series using updated background models and processing standards (Release 05). These improvements have enabled considerable progress in analyzing mass transports and mass distributions in the Earth system. The launch of the GOCE satellite in March 2009 has further increased our knowledge of the static gravity field. GRACE-1 radio occultation measurements have routinely been generated since autumn 2006 and are already assimilated together with CHAMP, COSMIC and METOP RO data by weather services. A GRACE-FO mission, due for launch end of 2016, has successfully passed the Mission Concept Review in October 2011 and started Phase A in January 2012.

In 2006, the German Research Association (DFG) had established the priority research program SPP1257 „Mass transport and mass distribution in the system Earth”, in order to enable scientific analysis and interpretation of the data from the new generation of gravity and altimetry satellite missions. In the SPP1257, hydrologists, glaciologists, oceanographers, geophysicists, geodesists and mathematicians work together towards the understanding of Earth system processes. SPP1257 was funded for six years, between 2007 and 2012. The results which have been achieved within the different interdisciplinary projects shall be presented at the final SPP1257 colloquium which will be jointly organized with the GRACE Science Team Meeting.

IMPORTANT DATES

• Meeting proceedings: October 12, 2012