CNES Earth Mean Sea Surface
Geodynamics studies have an interest in the Earth’s Mean Sea Surface (MSS). CNES has provided such a grid post-processed by IGPP (Sandwell_et_al., 2022).
Usage
You access a global MSS grid by specifying the special name
@earth_mss[_rru[_reg]]
The following codes for rru and the optional reg are supported (dimensions are listed for pixel-registered grids; gridline-registered grids increment dimensions by one):
Code
Dimensions
Reg
Size
Description
01d
360 x 180
g,p
82 KB
1 arc degree global MSS (MSS @ 315 km)
30m
720 x 360
g,p
245 KB
30 arc minute global MSS (MSS @ 157 km)
20m
1080 x 540
g,p
500 KB
20 arc minute global MSS (MSS @ 105 km)
15m
1440 x 720
g,p
840 KB
15 arc minute global MSS (MSS @ 79 km)
10m
2160 x 1080
g,p
1.7 MB
10 arc minute global MSS (MSS @ 52 km)
06m
3600 x 1800
g,p
4.3 MB
6 arc minute global MSS (MSS @ 32 km)
05m
4320 x 2160
g,p
5.7 MB
5 arc minute global MSS (MSS @ 26 km)
04m
5400 x 2700
g,p
8.5 MB
4 arc minute global MSS (MSS @ 21 km)
03m
7200 x 3600
g,p
15 MB
3 arc minute global MSS (MSS @ 16 km)
02m
10800 x 5400
g,p
26 MB
2 arc minute global MSS (MSS @ 11 km)
01m
21600 x 10800
g
79 MB
1 arc minute global MSS (original)
Note that resolutions 05m and higher are tiled. See Remote Data Sets for more information.
See GMT remote dataset usage for when resolution codes are optional or required.
All of these data will, when downloaded, be placed in your ~/.gmt/server directory, with
the earth_mss files being placed in an earth/earth_mss sub-directory. If you do not
specify a CPT, the default CPT for this dataset (the GMT master @earth_mss CPT) will be used.
Technical Information
We scale and reformat the original data to take up very little space so that downloads from the servers are as fast as possible. For the MSS grid this means we chose 0.01 m as the smallest data unit, which is well below the uncertainties in the model. Data are scaled and shifted to fit in a short integer grid that is highly compressed by netCDF lossless compression and chunking. The data are reported in meters.