High‐resolution CSR GRACE RL05 mascons

Abstract 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…