Intercomparisons of CSR GRACE-FO Solutions with External Data Sets

To assess the quality of the CSR solutions, we compare results against external data sets that have contemporaneous availability. These evaluations fall into three categories: changes in terrestrial water storage against data from the North American and Global Land Data Assimilation Systems, variations in ocean bottom pressure against data from the Deep Ocean Assessment of Tsunami Network, and estimates of the low degree and order Stokes coefficients compared against those inferred from satellite laser ranging observations (i.e. the CSR monthly 5x5 gravity harmonics from the MEaSUREs project). As the mission provides a unique measurement of mass changes in the Earth system, evaluation of the new solutions against other data sets and models is challenging. Thus, we primarily focus on relative agreement with these data set with the GRACE-FO solutions in relation to the historic agreement of the data sets with the GRACE solutions.