Assessing the interannual and subseasonal variabilities in water storage using multi-source soil moisture products and GRACE/GRACE-FO satellites and its applications

Abstract

Since 2002, the terrestrial water storage anomalies (TWSA) derived from the Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment (GRACE) and its successor, GRACE Follow-on (GRACE-FO), have been widely used in water storage studies. Interannual and subseasonal variabilities in terrestrial water storage are critical for understanding the change of water cycle and interpretation of GRACE error. In this study, we evaluate the interannual plus subseasonal terms of global TWSA from GRACE satellite data and soil moisture storage estimated from multi-source soil moisture data. Results show that soil moisture change dominated total water storage change in most regions, especially in relatively arid regions. We further reconstruct the continuous TWSA by combing the trend and seasonal terms from the GRACE(-FO) TWSA data with the interannual and subseasonal variabilities of multi-source soil moisture products on a global scale from April 2002 to December 2021. Our reconstruction result is further compared with the TWSA from GRACE(-FO) and two recent reconstruction products. The comparisons show that the reconstruction result has great consistency with GRACE(-FO), with 82% of the grids showing Nash-Sutcliffe efficiency coefficient values greater than 0.6 based on JPL Mascon solution. This study emphasizes that the information from soil moisture can provide an efficient approach for tracking the interannual and subseasonal variabilities of long-term terrestrial water storage.