Integrating GRACE/GRACE Follow-On and Wells Data to Detect Groundwater Storage Recovery at a Small-Scale in Beijing Using Deep Learning

Abstract

Groundwater depletion is adversely affecting Beijing’s ecology and environment. However, the effective execution of the South-to-North Water Diversion Project’s middle route (SNDWP-MR) is anticipated to mitigate Beijing’s groundwater depletion. Here, we propose a robust hybrid statistical downscaling method aimed at enhancing the capability of the Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment (GRACE) to detect the small-scale groundwater storage anomaly (GWSA) in Beijing. We used three deep learning (DL) methods to reconstruct the 0.5° × 0.5° terrestrial water storage anomaly (TWSA) between 2004 and 2021. Moreover, multiple processing strategies were used to downscale the GWSA to 0.25° from 2004 to 2021 by integrating wells and GRACE/GRACE follow-on data from the optimal DL model. Additionally, we analyzed the spatiotemporal evolution trends of GW in Beijing before and after the implementation of the SNDWP-MR. The results show that the long short-term memory model delivers optimal performance in the TWSA reconstruction of Beijing, with the correlation coefficient (CC), Nash–Sutcliffe coefficient (NSE), and root mean square error (RMSE) being 0.98, 0.96, and 10.19 mm, respectively. The GWSA before and after downscaling is basically consistent with wells data, but the CC and RMSE of downscaling the GWSA from 2004 to 2021 are improving by 34% and 31%, respectively. Before the SNDWP-MR (2004–2014), the trend of GWSA in Beijing was −17.68 ± 4.46 mm/y, with a human contribution of 69.30%. After SNDWP-MR (2015–2021), GWSA gradually increased by 10.00 mm per year, with the SNDWP-MR accounting for 18.30%. This study delivers a technical innovation reference for dynamically monitoring a small-scale GWSA from GRACE/GRACE-FO data.