How to access protected GRACE and GRACE-FO netcdf files?

[aa_minkah]

I am conducting postgraduate research on groundwater storage in the Volta Basin. I downloaded JPL TELLUS GRACE Level-3 Monthly Land Water-Equivalent-Thickness Surface Mass Anomaly Release 6.0 version 04 files, on Monday 15th April, 2024. These are marked as protected. How do I obtain access so I can conduct analysis in Python on these GRACE netcdf files? (download links at this download website https://search.earthdata.nasa.gov/downloads/9487374976). I use Windows 11 Home.

[PODAAC - wenhaoli]

Thank you for your inquiry. To access the protected data, you first need to register an account with Earthdata (https://urs.earthdata.nasa.gov/home). Assuming you want to download the JPL Mascon product (https://podaac.jpl.nasa.gov/dataset/TELLUS_GRAC-GRFO_MASCON_CRI_GRID_RL06.1_V3), you can find the download methods under Data Access tab after you login to earthdata account. We suggest you to use the data subscriber tool to download the data, such as

podaac-data-downloader -c TELLUS_GRAC-GRFO_MASCON_CRI_GRID_RL06.1_V3 -d ./data --start-date 2002-04-04T00:00:00Z --end-date 2002-04-11T00:00:00Z -e ""

Please let us know if you have any further questions.