Scientific Colloquium
May 13, 2011
JOHN WAHR
UNIVERSITY OF COLORADO
"The
GRACE Satellite Mission: Using Time-variable Gravity to Study the Earth"
GRACE is arguably the most
interdisciplinary remote sensing satellite mission ever launched.
It has been mapping the Earth's global gravity field every month
since 2002. Differences between these monthly solutions give
information about time-variability in the gravity field, and so about
month-to-month variations in the Earth's mass distribution. The results
are being used to study such widely varying things as ice loss in
Antarctica and Greenland, changes in the storage of water and snow on
land, ocean mass variability, and processes in the solid Earth
(e.g post-glacial-rebound; very large earthquakes). This talk will
describe the GRACE mission, and the kinds of things people are doing
with the data.