A systematic impact assessment of GRACE error correlation on data assimilation in hydrological models

Schumacher, Maike; Kusche, Jürgen; Döll, Petra

doi:10.1007/s00190-016-0892-y

Cited by 55 publications

(74 citation statements)

References 108 publications

(97 reference statements)

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“…5.4), which is important for hydrological assessments (see e.g. Schumacher et al 2016). The spatial coverage of the current contribution also extends the previous studies to cover the entire Iran and the Tigris-Euphrates river basin.…”

Section: Introductionsupporting

confidence: 70%

“…The zonal degree 2 spherical harmonic coefficients ðC 20 Þ are replaced by those in Cheng et al (2013) (see also http://grace.jpl.nasa.gov) since they are found to be better estimated. GRACE Level 2 products contain correlated errors (due to measurement errors, sampling of the mission, and background errors, see, e.g., Schumacher et al 2016), which express themselves as striping patterns in the spatial domain. These errors mask hydrological signals and make their detection difficult (Kusche 2007).…”

Section: Total Water Storage Products From Gracementioning

confidence: 99%

“…GRACE's unique products along with complementary observations (e.g., satellite altimetry) and modeling techniques (e.g., land surface model, 'LSM,' simulations) can be used for basin scale water balance studies (see, e.g., Kusche et al 2012;Schumacher et al 2016;Wouters et al 2014 for a review). For example, GRACE and LSM were applied in Voss et al (2013) to monitor groundwater variability over the Tigris-Euphrates river basin, and in Joodaki et al (2014) to estimate anthropogenic contributions to groundwater loss over Iran.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Large-Scale Total Water Storage and Water Flux Changes over the Arid and Semiarid Parts of the Middle East from GRACE and Reanalysis Products

et al. 2016

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Previous studies indicate that water storage over a large part of the Middle East has been decreased over the last decade. Variability in the total (hydrological) water flux (TWF, i.e., precipitation minus evapotranspiration minus runoff) and water storage changes of the Tigris-Euphrates river basin and Iran's six major basins (Khazar, Persian, Urmia, Markazi, Hamun, and Sarakhs) over 2003-2013 is assessed in this study. Our investigation is performed based on the TWF that are estimated as temporal derivatives of terrestrial water storage (TWS) changes from the Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment (GRACE) products and those from the reanalysis products of ERA-Interim and MERRA-Land. An inversion approach is applied to consistently estimate the spatio-temporal changes of soil moisture and groundwater storage compartments of the seven basins during the study period from GRACE TWS, altimetry, and land surface model products. The influence of TWF trends on separated water storage compartments is then explored. Our results, estimated as basin averages, indicate negative trends in the maximums of TWF peaks that reach up to -5.2 and -2.6 (mm/month/year) over 2003-2013, respectively, for the Urmia and Tigris-Euphrates basins, which are most likely due to the reported meteorological drought. Maximum amplitudes of the soil moisture compartment exhibit negative trends of -11.1, -6.6, -6.1, -4.8, -4.7, -3.8, and -1.2 (mm/year) for Urmia, Tigris-Euphrates, Khazar, Persian, Markazi, Sarakhs, and Hamun basins, respectively. Strong groundwater storage decrease is found, respectively, within the Khazar -8.6 (mm/ year) and Sarakhs -7.0 (mm/year) basins. The magnitude of water storage decline in the Urmia and Tigris-Euphrates basins is found to be bigger than the decrease in the monthly accumulated TWF indicating a contribution of human water use, as well as surface and groundwater flow to the storage decline over the study area.

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Section: Introductionsupporting

confidence: 70%

Section: Total Water Storage Products From Gracementioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Large-Scale Total Water Storage and Water Flux Changes over the Arid and Semiarid Parts of the Middle East from GRACE and Reanalysis Products

et al. 2016

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“…The GRACE mission has also provided novel opportunities to diagnose and to identify systematic deficiencies in global hydrological and land surface models (LSMs) [Swenson and Milly, 2006;Güntner, 2008]. More recently, GRACE observations have been used to improve LSMs, either through changes in model structure and parametrization [Lo et al, 2010;Werth and Güntner, 2010;Swenson and Lawrence, 2015] or directly by means of data assimilation techniques [Zaitchik et al, 2008;Eicker et al, 2014;Kumar et al, 2016;Schumacher et al, 2016].…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

A global reconstruction of climate‐driven subdecadal water storage variability

Humphrey

Gudmundsson

Seneviratne

2017

Geophysical Research Letters

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Since 2002, the Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment (GRACE) mission has provided unprecedented observations of global mass redistribution caused by hydrological processes. However, there are still few sources on pre‐2002 global terrestrial water storage (TWS). Classical approaches to retrieve past TWS rely on either land surface models (LSMs) or basin‐scale water balance calculations. Here we propose a new approach which statistically relates anomalies in atmospheric drivers to monthly GRACE anomalies. Gridded subdecadal TWS changes and time‐dependent uncertainty intervals are reconstructed for the period 1985–2015. Comparisons with model results demonstrate the performance and robustness of the derived data set, which represents a new and valuable source for studying subdecadal TWS variability, closing the ocean/land water budgets and assessing GRACE uncertainties. At midpoint between GRACE observations and LSM simulations, the statistical approach provides TWS estimates (doi:) that are essentially derived from observations and are based on a limited number of transparent model assumptions.

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“…Spatial disaggregation is also needed to reconcile the difference in horizontal resolution between the observations and the model. Recent studies by Eicker et al (2014) and Schumacher et al (2016) suggested including the GRACE variance-covariance error information in the spatial disaggregation step. Both studies proposed using 500 km GRACE spatial resolution to mitigate the ill-posedness of the error covariance matrices in the spatial domain.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Improving estimates of water resources in a semi-arid region by assimilating GRACE data into the PCR-GLOBWB hydrological model

Tangdamrongsub

Steele‐Dunne

Gunter

et al. 2017

Hydrol. Earth Syst. Sci.

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Abstract. An accurate estimation of water resources dynamics is crucial for proper management of both agriculture and the local ecology, particularly in semi-arid regions. Imperfections in model physics, uncertainties in model land parameters and meteorological data, as well as the human impact on land changes often limit the accuracy of hydrological models in estimating water storages. To mitigate this problem, this study investigated the assimilation of terrestrial water storage variation (TWSV) estimates derived from the Gravity Recovery And Climate Experiment (GRACE) data using an ensemble Kalman filter (EnKF) approach. The region considered was the Hexi Corridor in northern China. The hydrological model used for the analysis was PCR-GLOBWB, driven by satellite-based forcing data from April 2002 to December 2010. The impact of the GRACE data assimilation (DA) scheme was evaluated in terms of the TWSV, as well as the variation of individual hydrological storage estimates. The capability of GRACE DA to adjust the storage level was apparent not only for the entire TWSV but also for the groundwater component. In this study, spatially correlated errors in GRACE data were taken into account, utilizing the full error variance-covariance matrices provided as a part of the GRACE data product. The benefits of this approach were demonstrated by comparing the EnKF results obtained with and without taking into account error correlations. The results were validated against in situ groundwater data from five well sites. On average, the experiments showed that GRACE DA improved the accuracy of groundwater storage estimates by as much as 25 %. The inclusion of error correlations provided an equal or greater improvement in the estimates. In contrast, a validation against in situ streamflow data from two river gauges showed no significant benefits of GRACE DA. This is likely due to the limited spatial and temporal resolution of GRACE observations. Finally, results of the GRACE DA study were used to assess the status of water resources over the Hexi Corridor over the considered 9-year time interval. Areally averaged values revealed that TWS, soil moisture, and groundwater storages over the region decreased with an average rate of approximately 0.2, 0

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A systematic impact assessment of GRACE error correlation on data assimilation in hydrological models

Abstract: We use GRACE data to improve a hydrological model estimations • Data assimilation is used to ingrate observation into a model • We apply stochastic and deterministic ensemble-based Kalman filters (EnKF) and Particle filter • Filters performances are compared to reach the best result

Cited by 55 publications

References 108 publications

Large-Scale Total Water Storage and Water Flux Changes over the Arid and Semiarid Parts of the Middle East from GRACE and Reanalysis Products

Large-Scale Total Water Storage and Water Flux Changes over the Arid and Semiarid Parts of the Middle East from GRACE and Reanalysis Products

A global reconstruction of climate‐driven subdecadal water storage variability

Improving estimates of water resources in a semi-arid region by assimilating GRACE data into the PCR-GLOBWB hydrological model

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