Improved Drought Characteristics in the Pearl River Basin Based on Reconstructed GRACE Solution with Enhanced Temporal Resolution

Abstract

As global warming intensifies, the damage caused by drought cannot be disregarded. Traditional drought monitoring is often carried out with monthly resolution, which fails to monitor the sub-monthly climatic event. The GRACE-based drought severity index (DSI) is a drought index based on terrestrial water storage anomalies (TWSA) observed by the gravity recovery and climate experiment (GRACE) satellite. DSI has the ability to monitor drought effectively, and it is in good consistency with other drought monitoring methods. However, the temporal resolution of DSI is limited by that of GRACE observations, so it is necessary to obtain TWSA with a higher temporal resolution to calculate DSI. We use a statistical method to reconstruct the TWSA, which adopts precipitation and temperature to obtain TWSA on a daily resolution. This statistical method needs to be combined with the time series decomposition method, and then the parameters are simulated by the Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) procedure. In this study, we use this TWSA reconstruction method to obtain high-quality TWSA at daily time resolution. The correlation coefficient between CSR–TWSA and the reconstructed TWSA is 0.97, the Nash–Sutcliffe efficiency is 0.93, and the root mean square error is 16.57. The quality of the reconstructed daily TWSA is evaluated, and the DSI on a daily resolution is calculated to analyze the drought phenomenon in the Pearl River basin (PRB). The results show that the TWSA reconstructed by this method has high consistency with other daily publicly available TWSA products and TWSA provided by the Center for Space Research (CSR), which proves the feasibility of this method. The correlation between DSI based on reconstructed daily TWSA, SPI, and SPEI is greater than 0.65, which is feasible for drought monitoring. From 2003 to 2021, the DSI recorded six drought events in the PRB, and the recorded drought is more consistent with SPI-6 and SPEI-6. There was a drought event from 27 May 2011 to 12 October 2011, and this drought event had the lowest DSI minimum (minimum DSI = −1.76) recorded among the six drought events. The drought monitored by the DSI is in line with government announcements. This study provides a method to analyze drought events at a higher temporal resolution, and this method is also applicable in other areas.