Fig. 1.

Illustration of leakage and attenuation effects in GRACE/GRACE-FO derived mass change using synthetic mass rates (in cm/year of equivalent water height) over the Antarctic Peninsula and West Antarctica. a the synthetic mass rate model with uniform distribution of ice loss of 30 Gigatonne per year (Gt/year) over the Northern Peninsula, and 120 Gt/year over Amundsen Sea Embayment (ASE) coastal regions, corresponding to ~ − 30 cm/year mass rates in the two modeled (blue) regions; b mass rates as they would appear when the gravity SH coefficients are truncated at degree and order 60 (with no filtering or smoothing applied); c similar to (b), but with 300 km Gaussian smoothing applied; d similar to (b), but with 500 km Gaussian smoothing applied. Different color scales are purposely chosen for the 4 panels to better illustrate the effect (see Chen et al. 2015 for details of the simulations)