MISSION APPLICATIONS SUPPORT AT NASA: THE GRAVITY RECOVERY AND CLIMATE EXPERIMENT (GRACE) MISSIONS

GRACE is an international success story in cooperative satellite remote sensing science that has revolutionized the understanding of decadal- and sub-decadal-scale water movement across the globe. With over 12 years of monthly data on global mass variations, it is providing unprecedented observations of global change. The relevance of GRACE for hydrologic research is significant and growing. GRACE data are currently being used operationally by the NOAA Drought Mitigation Center, and in the State of California 2013 Water Plan. A recent study points to the utility of GRACE for flood forecasting. Along with German space agency partners, NASA plans to launch the GRACE Follow On (GRACE-FO) mission in 2017 to extend this important time series of global gravity data. Enhanced technologies on the proposed GRACE-2 mission would carry this important data into the next decade. This series of space gravimetry missions are, therefore, one of the most utilitarian of NASA’s missions for observing climate change and record trends in the global hydrosphere and cryosphere.

The NASA Applied Sciences Program actively promotes a formalized applications program to support Earth science missions in the flight planning process. The goal is to engage applications-oriented users and organizations and to promote applied uses of the mission data. This includes integrating end-user needs into processing strategies for level-2 data product development, thus increasing the benefits of the space program to the nation.

Successful strategies to enhance science and practical applications of current and future GRACE missions data streams will require engaging with representatives in the science, societal applications, and mission planning communities.

Some key objectives include:

• Engage a core current user community for data from the GRACE missions,
• Coordinate an applications team, including GRACE Project leads, data experts and international partners
• Optimize access to information about the GRACE missions capabilities, as well as base and higher level data products in order to effectively engage all potential users

Our focus: engage the science community, identify applications and users, develop infrastructure (plan, printed products, etc.), conduct user workshops, assess user data needs and access, and provide decision support.