Further assessments of CSR RL04 GRACE gravity field solutions

The GRACE Release-04 gravity field data products from UTCSR are considerably improved compared to the previously available Release-01 products. This improvement has been realized through improvements in background gravity models as well as algorithmic changes in the GRACE data processing. These improved products have been available to the user community since late Feb 2007. The interpretation of RL-04 products is slightly different when compared to RL-01. Besides the improvement in quality, a different set of background gravity field models have been applied to the data before the RL-04 products were created. This leads to a potential change in the way these products must be interpreted. The paper will summarize the feedback received from the user community on the applications of these new data products. The error estimates of the RL-04 fields and their effect on interpretation will be presented. A brief review of future directions for product improvement will be provided, as well.