NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory
GRACE and GRACE Follow-On terrestrial water storage
Satellite gravimetry measuring month-to-month change in total terrestrial water storage, including groundwater. The only global observational record of aquifer depletion at continental scale, and the basis for most published statements about long-term groundwater loss.
Rights
- Commercial reuse
- Yes
- Redistribution
- Yes
- Derivative use
- Yes
- Attribution required
- No
- Restrictions
- Applies to material authored by US federal agencies. Third-party material carried within a federal product may be separately protected.
- Terms last checked
- 23 August 2026
Access and coverage
- Publisher
- NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory
- Website
- https://grace.jpl.nasa.gov/
- Geographic coverage
- Global
- Temporal coverage
- 2002 onwards
- Resolution
- ~300 km — coarse; not valid for individual boreholes
- Update frequency
- monthly
- Formats
- netcdf, csv
- Bulk download
- Available
- Registration required
- No
- Cost to Hydrionis
- Free
- Domains
- groundwater, resources, snow ice
Notes
GRACE resolves total water storage anomaly over areas of roughly 150,000 km² and cannot separate groundwater from soil moisture, snow and surface water without an auxiliary model. Hydrionis therefore never attributes a GRACE trend to a single named aquifer without a supporting ground-based record.