Evaluation of filtering effects on terrestrial water storage estimation from new GRACE releases

The present study aimed to understand the effect of filtering on global and regional terrestrial water storage (TWS) signal derived from Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment (GRACE) satellite data obtained from Centre for Space Research (CSR), Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) and GeoForschungsZentrum (GFZ). Our results show that the CSR and GFZ solutions were compatible after processing, while for JPL solutions were more challenging to eliminate data noises using filtering techniques. Concerning the effect of changing the Gauss filtering radius on TWS, differences were found to be at a maximum +/- 5 cm in annual amplitude and +/- 1 cm/yr in trend sections; mostly apparent in regions where the signal was anomalous. Various destriping methods may led to data misinterpretation, loss of available TWS signal or confusion. Finally, new releases of CSR (RL06) showed an improvement compared to former versions particularly for solutions for the specific time of year chosen in this study.