 My project uses the grace and grace follow-on satellites and the measurements from those satellites to measure variations in the mass of predominantly the Antarctic ice sheet and then I can use the measurements of the changes of mass to infer how the ice sheets are contributing to sea level rise. My project is important because using the grace and grace follow-on satellites we can measure the modern-day impacts of climate change predominantly through measuring melting of ice sheets but also things like the severity of drought and variations in rainfall patterns and sea level rise. It's important that we have these measurements because things like sea level rise caused by ice sheet melt they're going to impact many populations and also built infrastructure and currently we have no other method of measuring ice sheet melt and sea level rise at such a broad scale. When we put all the measurements together from the grace and grace follow-on satellites what we can do is we can look at a time series of how the mass is changing across various areas of the earth so one of the most interesting trends that we see forming is in Antarctica specifically along western Antarctica and on the Antarctic Peninsula we see an increasing decrease in ice sheet mass which is contributing to sea level rise and we've been seeing that since the grace satellites were in orbit from about early 2002 one of the other interesting trends that we've started to see again in Antarctica is in the Tottenglacier which is in eastern Antarctica which is pretty much directly south of Australia and since about 2013 we've seen really significant ice mass loss there something to the equivalent of half a million Olympic size pools worth of water that has melted from the ice sheet and entered the ocean from there but apart from ice sheets and glaciers we can also detect trends in drought and we can look at the wet and dry seasons in areas like the Amazon basin we can see lots of seasonal interesting signals there though what we hope in the future is that for these measurements and this research to inform policies that are going to mitigate and hopefully decrease future impacts of climate change