Southern Ocean variability derived from GRACE retrievals, model simulations and in-situ measurements

The Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment (GRACE) provides estimates of the Earth’s static and time-variant gravity field. Solutions from various processing centres (GFZ, CSR, GRGS, JPL etc.) enable us to determine mass redistributions on the globe. Given that land signals are generally large compared to anomalies over the ocean, an assessment of the latter requires a particularly careful filtering of the data. We utilized the Finite Element Sea-Ice Ocean Model (FESOM) to develop a filtering algorithm which relies on the spatial coherency of ocean bottom pressure (OBP) anomalies. Taking large-scale circulation patterns into account, the new filter yields an improved representation of OBP (i.e. ocean mass) variability in the filtered GRACE data.