Assessing the Consistency Among Three Mascon Solutions and COST-G-Based Grid Products for Characterizing Antarctic Ice Sheet Mass Change

To facilitate easy accessibility to the Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment (GRACE) and GRACE Follow-On (GRACE-FO) results for the geoscientific community, multiple institutions have successively developed mass anomaly grid products including mass concentration (mascon) grids; these were provided at the Gravity Information Service (GravIS) portal. However, an assessment of their consistency for studying large-scale mass redistribution and transport in Earth’s system is still not available. Here, we compare three major mascon solutions separately from the Center for Space Research (CSR), the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), the Goddard Space Flight Center (GSFC) and GravIS products based on the Combination Service for Time-variable Gravity fields (COST-G) by analyzing the Antarctic Ice Sheet (AIS) mass changes in four aspects. Our results demonstrate that: (1) the four datasets exhibit strong consistency on the entire AIS mass change time series, with the largest difference occurring in the Antarctic Peninsula; (2) mass trend estimates show better agreement over longer periods and larger regions, but differences with a percentage of 20–40 exist during the late stage of GRACE and the whole GRACE-FO timespan; (3) notable discrepancies arise in the annual statistics of the Eastern AIS in 2016, leading to inconsistency on the sign of annual AIS mass change; (4) good agreement can be seen among these interannual mass variations over the AIS and its three subregions during 2003–2023, excluding the period from mid-2016 to mid-2018. These findings may provide key insights into improving algorithms for mascon solutions and grid products towards refining their applications in ice mass balance studies.