Groundwater Monitoring Using Grace Mission

Abstract

Abstract. Since last few decades, India has met to major crises related to groundwater. Major cities, for example, Delhi, Chennai, Bengaluru etc. are facing extreme risk of water crisis. In next few decades, this may lead to a major water crisis when this non-renewable resource is exhausted. Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment (GRACE) mission, widely used for monitoring of groundwater storage change, could be utilized to get the information of exact amount of water above or below the surface of the earth that may be used to counter act over such situation of water crisis. GRACE mission consists of two earth orbiting satellite vehicles (SVs) separated by 220 km with the objective of computing change in gravity by increasing or decreasing distance between both the SVs caused by higher or lower gravity masses. The primary objective of the presented work is to obtain the liquid water equivalent height in a selected area using GRACE mission data with GLDAS soil moisture data. The advantage of using GRACE is that it provides better accuracy (fraction of 1cm) in comparison to traditional methods, therefore, larger extent could be covered. This paper extensively discusses about GRACE application (especially groundwater monitoring), challenges with GRACE missions and about effective methods for groundwater recharge.

Shortfalls and Challenges in Groundwater Regime Monitoring

“…Samurembi et al (2020) concluded that a good agreement between DTWS-GRACE and DTWS-in-situ exists except where sea-water intrusion occurs. Shukla et al (2021) opinioned GRACE mission, widely used for monitoring groundwater storage change, could be utilized to get information on the exact amount of water above or below the surface of the Earth that may be used to counteract such situations of the water crisis. Claire Pasca et al (2022) suggested advanced methods to improve the data quality close to the measured values.…”

Shortfalls and Challenges in Groundwater Regime Monitoring

“…Samurembi et al concluded that a good agreement between DTWS-GRACE and DTWS-in-situ exists except where sea-water intrusion occurs [19]. Shukla et al opinioned GRACE mission, widely used for monitoring groundwater storage change, could be utilized to get information on the exact amount of water above or below the surface of the Earth that may be used to counteract such situations of the water crisis [20]. Claire Pasca et al suggested advanced methods to improve the data quality close to the measured values [21].…”

Long-term spatiotemporal dynamics of groundwater storage in the data-scarce region: Tana sub-basin, Ethiopia

“…Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment (GRACE)/and its successor GRACE-Follow On (GRACE-FO) is one of the emerging remote sensing technologies widely used to successfully estimate GW storage anomaly (GWSA) [ 13 , 32 ]. It has brought a new dimension to evaluate GWSA changes in the large and small spatial scales of any hotspot region.…”