mascons

Mascons
Mass concentration elements, or mascons, are used as the basis functions to parameterise changes in Earth's gravity field.

Mass concentration elements, or mascons  (Muller and Sjogren, 1968), are used as the basis functions to parameterise changes in Earth's gravity field. Our primary mascons are created by clumping together ternary mascons of roughly 18x18 km. We can join the ternary mascons together in irregular shapes, providing the capability to follow coastlines with a spatial accuracy of < 10 km.

Various versions of our mascon field have been created, ranging in size from ~150x150km to ~300x300km. Ascii versions of the files are provided in the table below. 

Release versionMascon file
RL01mascons_stage5_V006_200km.gz
RL02mascons_stage5_V010_200km.gz

The Explanation of Mascon files documentprovides a description of the file format:

 

References