The meeting was intended to serve both as an information vehicle--to inform the wider community about the existence of GRACE and its capabilities--and to provide a forum for discussion of problems and applications of the data. At a precision of less than 1 cm, numerous previously negligible phenomena become significant. The meeting was thus divided into several overlapping sub-sessions focussed on the following questions:
(1) What is GRACE and what will it be able to do? What are the related missions, both for gravity and altimetry which will complement it? What are the most serious technical problems the mission will face?
(2) What are the effects of the oceanic inverted barometer response and its implications for interpretation of GRACE data.
(3) What is known from in situ observations of the nature of oceanic sea floor pressure variations?
(4) How accurate are the analyses of atmospheric mass (pressure at the seasurface) and wind-fields? To what extent are the atmospheric tidal components present in the operational and re-analysis products adequate for quantitative use? Are hourly values from the atmospheric analyses required or even adequate?
(5) How accurate are modern models of oceanic tides, and are they adequate for de-aliasing GRACE data?
(6) What are the physical implications of measurements of oceanic bottom pressure fluctuations?
(7) How accurate are existing oceanic general circulation models, both barotropic (for high frequencies) and full baroclinic ones? What are the resolution requirements? Is the Boussinesq approximation adequate? Is the known bathymetry sufficiently adequate and parameterized properly? Can one distinguish model errors from meteorological forcing errors?
(8) Are data assimilation techniques and computer power adequate to assimilate altimetric and other data so as to de-alias GRACE at high frequencies? What will be the impact of the GRACE data when assimilated into GCMs along with other oceanographic data?
(9) What is our collective field capability, and how should we best use it to complement GRACE? How should this field capability be used to calibrate and test the GRACE system?
(10) What are the implications of GRACE and the related oceanography, to studies of earth rotation and polar motion?
In each sub-session, one or two speakers were asked to summarize their view of the state of the subject, the major issues, and to stimulate discussion. Usually there was a ``respondent'' to help start the discussion, and then the floor was open to all for comment and presentation. The major issues and conclusions are summarized below. Many issues were necessarily left for the future.