Mitigation of along-track artifacts in unconstrained mass transport models based on GRACE satellite data

The satellite gravity mission GRACE (Gravity Recovery And Climate Experiment), which was launched in 2002, offers a unique opportunity to monitor tiny variations of the Earth’s gravity and associated mass transport from space. In particular, the redistribution of water in the Earth’s system can be traced in this way, which is critical for monitoring key climate indicators such as ice-sheet mass balance, terrestrial water-storage change, sea-level rise, and ocean circulation. Unfortunately, mass transport models based on GRACE data suffer from along-track artifacts. In order to suppress these artifacts, various filtering algorithms are applied to unconstrained GRACE-based models at the post-processing stage. However, any filtering not only suppresses noise but also distorts signals. Therefore, it is important to study the precise origin of the along-track artifacts in an attempt to mitigate them already at the level of unconstrained solutions.