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In the past twenty years, gravimetry missions have demonstrated a unique capability to monitor major climate-related changes of the Earth directly from space – among others quantifying the melt of large glaciers and ice sheets, global sea level rise, continental draught and major flooding events. A Quantum Space Gravimetry (QSG) mission will provide corresponding Essential Climate Variables (ECV) with unprecedented quality compared to the initially demonstrated and already very successful missions like GOCE and GRACE (FO). To respond to the increasing demand of the user community for sustained mass change observations at higher spatial and temporal resolution, ESA and NASA are coordinating their activities and harmonizing their cooperation scenarios in an implementation framework, called MAGIC (MAss change and Geosciences International Constellation). In a future post-MAGIC mission, classical sensors can be combined with a Cold Atom Interferometry (CAI) instrument, or at a later stage a full quantum sensor could be employed. These Quantum Missions for Climate will reach sensitivities, which enable many applications addressing user needs with respect to water management and hazard prevention among others. Several studies related to these new sensor concepts were initiated at ESA, including technology development for different instrument configurations and validation activities. A new study has been initiated, the Quantum Space Gravimetry for Earth Mass Transport (QSG4EMT), with the focus on both, QSG mission architectures for monitoring of Earth's mass transport processes and the development of QSG user requirements.
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