The EGSIEM Near Real-Time Service based on GRACE Mission Data – Review and Outlook

To enable the use of GRACE and GRACE-FO data for rapid monitoring applications, the EGSIEM (European Gravity Service for Improved Emergency Management) project, funded by the Horizon 2020 Framework Program for Research and Innovation of the European Union, implemented a demonstrator for a near real-time (NRT) gravity field service. The goal of this service is to provide daily gravity field solutions as gridded water storage anomaly with a maximum latency of five days. For this purpose, two independent approaches were developed at the German Research Centre for Geosciences (GFZ) and Graz University of Technology. Based on these daily gravity field solutions, statistical flood and drought indicators are derived by the EGSIEM Hydrological Service, developed at GFZ. The NRT products are subsequently provided to the Center for Satellite based Crisis Information (ZKI) at the German Aerospace Center as well as the Global Flood Awareness System (GloFAS) at the Joint Research Center of the European Commission, for experimental integration into their respective operations.
In this contribution, results from the three month long operational test run of the service, which started on April 1 2017 and ran until June 30 2017, are presented. Focus lies on the gravity field processing chain at Graz University of Technology. The performance of the service is evaluated by comparison of the NRT GRACE gravity products with post-processed solutions, as well as in-situ data.