Description: he joint ESA/NASA Mass-change And Geosciences International Constellation (MAGIC) mission has the objective to extend time series from previous gravity missions, including an improvement of accuracy and spatio-temporal resolution. The long-term monitoring of Earth's gravity field carries information on mass-change induced by water cycle, climate change, and mass transport processes between atmosphere, cryosphere, oceans and solid Earth. The MAGIC mission will be composed of two satellite pairs flying in different orbit planes. The NASA/DLR--led first pair (P1) is expected to be in a near-polar orbit around 500 km of altitude; while the second ESA--led pair (P2) is expected to be in an inclined orbit of 65--70 degrees at approximately 400 km altitude. The ESA--led pair P2 Next Generation Gravity Mission (NGGM) shall be launched after P1 in a staggered manner to form the MAGIC constellation. The addition of an inclined pair shall lead to reduction of temporal aliasing effects and consequently of reliance on de-aliasing models and post-processing. The main novelty of the MAGIC constellation is the delivery of mass-change products at higher spatial resolution, temporal (i.e. sub--weekly) resolution, shorter latency, and higher accuracy than GRACE and GRACE-FO. This will pave the way to new science applications and operational services. The performances of different MAGIC mission scenarios for different application areas in the field of geosciences were analysed in the frame of the initial ESA Science Support activities for MAGIC. The data sets provided here are the Level-2a simulated gravity field solutions of MAGIC scenarios and the related reference signal that were used for these analyses. The .gfc files in the folders monthly (31-day solutions) and weekly (7-day solutions) contain the estimated (HIS) coefficients (Cnm, Snm) as well as the formal errors (SigCnm, SigSnm) of the different MAGIC scenarios. In order to compute the coefficient errors, the reference/true HIS coefficients contained in the folder HIS_reference_fields need to be subtracted from the estimated HIS coefficients. The data sets provided here comprise the Level-2a simulated gravity field solutions of MAGIC scenarios and the related reference signal (based on Dobslaw et al. 2014; 2015) that were used for the above analyses.

Description: The joint ESA/NASA Mass-change And Geosciences International Constellation (MAGIC) has the objective to extend time-series from previous gravity missions, including an improvement of accuracy and spatio-temporal resolution. The long-term monitoring of Earth’s gravity field carries information on mass change induced by water cycle, climate change and mass transport processes between atmosphere, cryosphere, oceans and solid Earth. MAGIC will be composed of two satellite pairs flying in different orbit planes. The NASA/DLR-led first pair (P1) is expected to be in a near-polar orbit around 500 km of altitude; while the second ESA-led pair (P2) is expected to be in an inclined orbit of 65°–70° at approximately 400 km altitude. The ESA-led pair P2 Next Generation Gravity Mission shall be launched after P1 in a staggered manner to form the MAGIC constellation. The addition of an inclined pair shall lead to reduction of temporal aliasing effects and consequently of reliance on de-aliasing models and post-processing. The main novelty of the MAGIC constellation is the delivery of mass-change products at higher spatial resolution, temporal (i.e. subweekly) resolution, shorter latency and higher accuracy than the Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment (GRACE) and Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment Follow-On (GRACE-FO). This will pave the way to new science applications and operational services. In this paper, an overview of various fields of science and service applications for hydrology, cryosphere, oceanography, solid Earth, climate change and geodesy is provided. These thematic fields and newly enabled applications and services were analysed in the frame of the initial ESA Science Support activities for MAGIC. The analyses of MAGIC scenarios for different application areas in the field of geosciences confirmed that the double-pair configuration will significantly enlarge the number of observable mass-change phenomena by resolving smaller spatial scales with an uncertainty that satisfies evolved user requirements expressed by international bodies such as IUGG. The required uncertainty levels of dedicated thematic fields met by MAGIC unfiltered Level-2 products will benefit hydrological applications by recovering more than 90 per cent of the major river basins worldwide at 260 km spatial resolution, cryosphere applications by enabling mass change signal separation in the interior of Greenland from those in the coastal zones and by resolving small-scale mass variability in challenging regions such as the Antarctic Peninsula, oceanography applications by monitoring meridional overturning circulation changes on timescales of years and decades, climate applications by detecting amplitude and phase changes of Terrestrial Water Storage after 30 yr in 64 and 56 per cent of the global land areas and solid Earth applications by lowering the Earthquake detection threshold from magnitude 8.8 to magnitude 7.4 with spatial resolution increased to 333 km.