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Data · dataset · 2026

Correction of GRACE measurements of the Earth's moment of inertia (MOI)

Listed in National Center for Atmospheric Research

The widely used 15-year Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment (GRACE) data sets do not conserve global total mass.

Description

They have a spurious decreasing trend of similar to 280 Gt/year. Various regions contribute differently to the global total mass loss error, with the Greenland Ice Sheet (GrIS) generating similar to 10% of the error alone.

Atmospheric parameters from reanalysis datasets drive a well-tested ice model to generate mass variation time series over the GrIS for 2002-2015. Because shorter timescale spikes of similar to 10-30 Gt in GRACE measurements are physically based, only the overall trend of similar to 30 Gt/year requires correcting. A more accurate mass loss rate estimate for 2002-2015 is similar to 120 Gt/year, considerably below previous estimates.

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With the water redistribution to lower latitudes and other effects from a warming climate, the nontidal Earth moment of inertia (MOI) also increases. After rectification, the GRACE measured mass redistribution shows a steady, statistically robust (passed a two-tailed t-test at p = 0.04 for dof = 15) rate of MOI increase reaching similar to 10.1 x 10(27) kg m(2)/year, equivalent to a 10.91 mu s/year increase in the length of a day, during 2002-2017.

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Provenance · 1 source records, 7 field assertions
SourceKeyLast seenRaw
National Center for Atmospheric Research3d3015d7-9c51-408c-95c0-e19d0a2f169e13 d agoJSON v1
FieldAssertionExtractorEvidence
concepts[field].local:field:earth-environmentalmapping · data ucar educonnector:data_ucar_edu@1.0.0
concepts[field].local:field:ocean-atmosphericmapping · data ucar educonnector:data_ucar_edu@1.0.0
created_datesource · data ucar educonnector:data_ucar_edu@1.0.0
descriptionsource · data ucar educonnector:data_ucar_edu@1.0.0/notes
publication_datesource · data ucar educonnector:data_ucar_edu@1.0.0
titlesource · data ucar educonnector:data_ucar_edu@1.0.0/title
updated_datesource · data ucar educonnector:data_ucar_edu@1.0.0