Abstract
Abstract. Time series of regional 2° × 2° Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment (GRACE) solutions have been computed from 2003 to 2011 with a 10-day resolution by using an energy integral method over Australia (112° E–156° E; 44° S–10° S). This approach uses the dynamical orbit analysis of GRACE Level 1 measurements, and specially accurate along-track K-band range rate (KBRR) residuals with a 1 μm s−1 level of errors, to estimate the total water mass over continental regions. The advantages of regional solutions are a significant reduction of GRACE aliasing errors (i.e. north–south stripes) providing a more accurate estimation of water mass balance for hydrological applications. In this paper, the validation of these regional solutions over Australia is presented, as well as their ability to describe water mass change as a response of climate forcings such as El Niño. Principal component analysis of GRACE-derived total water storage (TWS) maps shows spatial and temporal patterns that are consistent with independent data sets (e.g. rainfall, climate index and in situ observations). Regional TWS maps show higher spatial correlations with in situ water table measurements over Murray–Darling drainage basin (80–90%), and they offer a better localization of hydrological structures than classical GRACE global solutions (i.e. Level 2 Groupe de Recherche en Géodésie Spatiale (GRGS)) products and 400 km independent component analysis solutions as a linear combination of GRACE solutions provided by different centers.
Highlights
IntroductionSince its launch in 2002, the Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment (GRACE) space mission, has provided first-time global estimates of changes in total water storage (surface water, soil moisture and groundwater) with unprecedented accuracy at global scales
Since its launch in 2002, the Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment (GRACE) space mission, has provided first-time global estimates of changes in total water storage with unprecedented accuracy at global scales
Where the analysis is made is not the same, the comparison is 3.2 Detection of localized hydrological events made between groundwater interannual variations over Murray Basin and the temporal mode 2 of GRACE which in- To demonstrate the improvement in detection brought by our cludes the whole continent signal, so more signals are spa- regional solutions, we confronted them with known meteotially averaged in the last case; (2) the localized distribu- rological events sharply localized in both space and time
Summary
Since its launch in 2002, the Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment (GRACE) space mission, has provided first-time global estimates of changes in total water storage (surface water, soil moisture and groundwater) with unprecedented accuracy at global scales. We propose that wa- reduction of both north–south striping due to the distribution ter storage variations from regional solutions over Australia of GRACE satellite tracks, and temporal aliasing of correctare compared with independent information given by the in ing models. Analysis of GRACE detectable because of errors in the standard GRACE data signals over Australia using PCA have already been proposed processing (e.g. oceanic non-tidal model deficiencies) and in previous studies (Rieser et al, 2010; Awange et al, 2011). We compared the regional solutions to three in situ and modelled hydrology data sets: (1) rainfall across the continent; (2) surface and subsurface storage in the Murray-Darling Basin (see Fig. 1); (3) soil moiture derived from australian hydrologic model. Time series of ICA-based global maps of continental water mass changes from combined global UTCSR, JPL and GFZ
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