Basin-scale water-balance dataset (BSWB): an update

Hirschi, Martin; Seneviratne, Sonia I.

doi:10.5194/essd-9-251-2017

Cited by 17 publications

(16 citation statements)

References 42 publications

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“…Such a belief springs, in part, from the fact that amplitudes of internal ocean variability in intra-and interannual mass that GRACE observes are relatively mute in comparison to on-land hydrology, two-way land-to-ocean transport, and secular trends in land ice changes (Chambers, 2006;Chambers and Willis, 2008;Watkins et al, 2015;Wiese et al, 2016;Save et al, 2016). In fact, Hsu and Velicogna (2017) have used ocean-bottom pressure data, in conjunction with space geodetic data, to claim that fingerprints associated with decadal-scale on-land mass changes are detected. Furthermore, Davis and Vinogradova (2017) have shown that the fingerprints of Greenland ice mass loss have had measurable influences on tide gauge records along the eastern coast of the US since the mid-1990s.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Sea-level fingerprints emergent from GRACE mission data

Adhikari

Ivins

Frederikse

et al. 2019

Earth Syst. Sci. Data

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Abstract. The Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment (GRACE) mission data have an important, if not revolutionary, impact on how scientists quantify the water transport on the Earth's surface. The transport phenomena include land hydrology, physical oceanography, atmospheric moisture flux, and global cryospheric mass balance. The mass transport observed by the satellite system also includes solid Earth motions caused by, for example, great subduction zone earthquakes and glacial isostatic adjustment (GIA) processes. When coupled with altimetry, these space gravimetry data provide a powerful framework for studying climate-related changes on decadal timescales, such as ice mass loss and sea-level rise. As the changes in the latter are significant over the past two decades, there is a concomitant self-attraction and loading phenomenon generating ancillary changes in gravity, sea surface, and solid Earth deformation. These generate a finite signal in GRACE and ocean altimetry, and it may often be desirable to isolate and remove them for the purpose of understanding, for example, ocean circulation changes and post-seismic viscoelastic mantle flow, or GIA, occurring beneath the seafloor. Here we perform a systematic calculation of sea-level fingerprints of on-land water mass changes using monthly Release-06 GRACE Level-2 Stokes coefficients for the span April 2002 to August 2016, which result in a set of solutions for the time-varying geoid, sea-surface height, and vertical bedrock motion. We provide both spherical harmonic coefficients and spatial maps of these global field variables and uncertainties therein (https://doi.org/10.7910/DVN/8UC8IR; Adhikari et al., 2019). Solutions are provided for three official GRACE data processing centers, namely the University of Texas Austin's Center for Space Research (CSR), GeoForschungsZentrum Potsdam (GFZ), and Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), with and without rotational feedback included and in both the center-of-mass and center-of-figure reference frames. These data may be applied for either study of the fields themselves or as fundamental filter components for the analysis of ocean-circulation- and earthquake-related fields or for improving ocean tide models.

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Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Sea-level fingerprints emergent from GRACE mission data

Adhikari

Ivins

Frederikse

et al. 2019

Earth Syst. Sci. Data

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“…A basin-scale diagnostic dataset of monthly variations in terrestrial water storage of large river basins (BSWB v2016) was taken to examine the multi-year balance of the Yangtze River Basin above Yichang gauge, where the QYJ Basin was included. This dataset was produced based on atmospheric and terrestrial water balances with streamflow measurements and reanalysis atmospheric moisture [34,35]. This dataset indicated that the Yangtze River Basin was relatively weak in annual variation during the period of 1979-1986 (multi-year averagely below 1.0 mm yr −1 ).…”

Section: Uncertainties In the Precipitation Estimationmentioning

confidence: 99%

Orographic Effects of Geomorphology on Precipitation in a Pluvial Basin of the Eastern Tibetan Plateau

Yang

Zhang

2019

Water

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The eastern Tibetan Plateau is subjected to strong spatial variations in precipitation, but the underlying reasons are still not well understood due to sparse in-situ meteorological observations. In this study, streamflow observations were adopted to investigate the orographic controls on precipitation in the Qingyijiang (QYJ) Basin of the eastern Tibetan Plateau. The method of multi-year annual water balance was used to estimate the basin-level precipitation using in-situ streamflow and flux-based evapotranspiration. In addition, elevation transect was designed to examine the possible links between precipitation and geomorphology. The results showed the severe under-estimation of regional precipitation by weather sites (~1150 mm yr−1) in the QYJ Basin, where the runoff depth was as high as ~1450 mm yr−1. The water balance revealed a much higher level of precipitation (~2000 mm yr−1) in the QYJ Basin, but precipitation in the two adjacent basins was contrastingly low (<1000 mm yr−1). The spatial pattern of precipitation was well consistent with the local horn-mouth geomorphology, with more precipitation occurring in the geomorphologically converging and elevating region. Furthermore, within the the QYJ Basin, annual precipitation was larger in the sub-basins (>2200 mm) on or near the bottom of the horn-mouth geomorphology than the others (<1800 mm). With these results, we concluded that the high precipitation level in the QYJ Basin could be attributed to the combined converging and lifting effects of geomorphology on the westward atmospheric vapor. Therefore, flooding risk should be carefully accounted for in the basins with similar geomorphology in the eastern Tibetan Plateau.

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“…Here, we aim to use such estimates to also evaluate the quality of the reconstruction during the period when no GRACE data are available (i.e., prior to 2002). We evaluate TWS products using a recently updated basinscale water balance dataset (BSWB) (Hirschi and Seneviratne, 2017), which covers 341 catchments and is based on ERA-Interim reanalysis data (Dee et al, 2011) and runoff observations from the Global Runoff Data Centre (GRDC). The temporal coverage of BSWB estimates at each river basin thus depends on the availability of runoff data and does not always cover the GRACE time period.…”

Section: Comparison With De-seasonalized Basin-scale Water Balancementioning

confidence: 99%

Final response to referees' comments and suggestions

Humphrey¹

2019

Preprint

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The amount of water stored on continents is an important constraint for water mass and energy exchanges in the Earth system and exhibits large inter-annual variability at both local and continental scales. From 2002 to 2017, the satellites of the Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment (GRACE) mission have observed changes in terrestrial water storage (TWS) with an unprecedented level of accuracy. In this paper, we use a statistical model trained with GRACE observations to reconstruct past climate-driven changes in TWS from historical and near-real-time meteorological datasets at daily and monthly scales. Unlike most hydrological models which represent water reservoirs individually (e.g., snow, soil moisture) and usually provide a single model run, the presented approach directly reconstructs total TWS changes and includes hundreds of ensemble members which can be used to quantify predictive uncertainty. We compare these data-driven TWS estimates with other independent evaluation datasets such as the sea level budget, large-scale water balance from atmospheric reanalysis, and in situ streamflow measurements. We find that the presented approach performs overall as well or better than a set of state-of-the-art global hydrological models (Water Resources Reanalysis version 2). We provide reconstructed TWS anomalies at a spatial resolution of 0.5 • , at both daily and monthly scales over the period 1901 to present, based on two different GRACE products and three different meteorological forcing datasets, resulting in six reconstructed TWS datasets of 100 ensemble members each. Possible user groups and applications include hydrological modeling and model benchmarking, sea level budget studies, assessments of long-term changes in the frequency of droughts, the analysis of climate signals in geodetic time series, and the interpretation of the data gap between the GRACE and GRACE Follow-On missions. The presented dataset is published at https://doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.7670849 (Humphrey and Gudmundsson, 2019) and updates will be published regularly.

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Basin-scale water-balance dataset (BSWB): an update

Cited by 17 publications

References 42 publications

Sea-level fingerprints emergent from GRACE mission data

Sea-level fingerprints emergent from GRACE mission data

Orographic Effects of Geomorphology on Precipitation in a Pluvial Basin of the Eastern Tibetan Plateau

Final response to referees' comments and suggestions

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