Time‐variable gravity from GRACE: First results

By John M. Wahr, S. Swenson, Victor Zlotnicki, Isabella Velicogna. 2004

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Eleven monthly GRACE gravity field solutions are now available for analyses. We show those fields can be used to recover monthly changes in water storage, both on land and in the ocean, to accuracies of 1.5 cm of water thickness when smoothed over 1000 km. The amplitude of the annually varying signal can be determined to 1.0 cm. Results are 30% better for a 1500 km smoothing radius, and 40% worse for a 750 km radius. We estimate the annually varying component of water storage for three large drainage basins (the Mississippi, the Amazon, and a region draining into the Bay of Bengal), to accuracies of 1.0–1.5 cm.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics, Molecular Biology, Oceanography

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/509798ceaf4574295264888573711c408182e316

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Citations in the corpus

Detection of Continental Hydrology and Glaciology Signals from GRACE: A Review (2008, methodology): “Models of the Earth’s geopotential are classically obtained from GRACE by inverting for monthly global estimates with spatial resolution of a few hundreds of km (Tapley et al. 2004b), with higher accuracy at larger scales (Swenson et al. 2003; Wahr et al. 2004).”
Interannual variations of the mass balance of the Antarctica and Greenland ice sheets from GRACE (2006, methodology): “…for precisely measuring spatio-temporal changes in liquid and solid water mass inside the surface fluid envelopes (e.g., Tapley et al., 2004a,b; Wahr et al., 2004; Chambers et al., 2004; Ramillien et al., 2005; Schmidt et al., 2006), including the ice sheets mass change (Velicogna and Wahr,…”
Groundwater depletion in the Middle East from GRACE with implications for transboundary water management in the Tigris-Euphrates-Western Iran region (2013, neutral): “Several previous GRACE studies [Wahr et al., 2004; Swenson and Wahr, 2006; Swenson and Milly, 2006; Niu et al., 2006; Syed et al., 2008] point to missing or poor model representations of snow, surface water bodies and reservoirs, complete soil depth, and groundwater storage as the key reason why…”
Time variations of land water storage from an inversion of 2 years of GRACE geoids (2005, background): “…the spherical harmonic coefficients of each monthly geoid are given up to degree and order 100, in this study we follow earlier studies (Tapley et al., 2004b, Wahr et al., 2004, Schmidt et al., 2005) and only consider harmonic coefficients up to degree 30 (half horizontal wavelength of 660 km).”
GRACE detects coseismic and postseismic deformation from the Sumatra‐Andaman earthquake (2007, methodology): “…used to estimate large scale mass redistribution within the Earth system, including terrestrial water storage change [e.g., Tapley et al., 2004b; Wahr et al., 2004; Chen et al., 2005a], non-steric sea level change [e.g., Chambers et al., 2004; Chen et al., 2005b], and polar ice sheet melting…”
Non-isotropic filtering of GRACE temporal gravity for geophysical signal enhancement (2005, methodology): “The accuracy of the monthly geoid changes inferred from GRACE was estimated following the method suggested by Wahr et al. (2004).”
Post‐processing removal of correlated errors in GRACE data (2006, background): “…bounds on the errors in the GRACE fields; these analyses indicate root-meansquare errors of approximately 1 cm for surface-mass estimates smoothed with a 1000 km Gaussian filter [Wahr et al., 2004], and 3 mm for geoid-height estimates smoothed with a 600 km Gaussian filter [Tapley et al., 2004b].”
Estimating geocenter variations from a combination of GRACE and ocean model output (2008, methodology): “We assess the errors in the GRACE data following Wahr et al. [2004] , which uses the root variance about the bestfitting annual cycle for each coefficient as a conservative error estimate.”
Observing seasonal steric sea level variations with GRACE and satellite altimetry (2006, background): “Other global analyses [Levitus et al., 2000; Willis et al., 2004] are limited to multiyear averages.”
Greenland mass balance from GRACE (2005, result): “Wahr et al [2004] and Tapley et al. [2004] show some initial results.”
Antarctic mass rates from GRACE (2006, background): “GRACE gravity field changes interpreted as surface mass redistribution have an accuracy of 1.5 cm equivalent water layer change at spatial scales greater than about 800 km [Wahr et al., 2004].”
Climate‐driven deformation of the solid Earth from GRACE and GPS (2004, background): “The signature of the Amazon Basin is distinct and large, as might be expected from the gravity and surface mass signals [Wahr et al., 2004; Tapley et al., 2004].”
Long‐Term (1979‐Present) Total Water Storage Anomalies Over the Global Land Derived by Reconstructing GRACE Data (2021, background): “Since 2002, the Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment (GRACE) satellites have measured the global total water storage anomalies with an unprecedented accuracy (Wahr et al., 2004).”
GGM02 – An improved Earth gravity field model from GRACE (2005, background): “This sequence of monthly gravity models showed clear evidence of reasonable Earth gravity field variability to resolutions as small as 600 km, primarily due to hydrological variations (Tapley et al. 2004b; Wahr et al. 2004 ).”
Reducing leakage error in GRACE-observed long-term ice mass change: a case study in West Antarctica (2015, background): “…the Earth system, and greatly improved understanding of large-scale mass redistribution in various components of the climate system, including the atmosphere, oceans, terrestrial water, and cryosphere (e.g., Wahr et al. 2004; Chambers et al. 2004; Cazenave and Chen 2010; Velicogna and Wahr 2013).”
Low degree spherical harmonic influences on Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment (GRACE) water storage estimates (2005, background): “Recent studies [ Wahr et al., 2004; Tapley et al., 2004b; Rodell et al., 2004b] concluded that seasonal water storage variations can, in fact, be derived from GRACE data for certain large basins (e.g., the Amazon, Mississippi, and Bay of Bengal), when appropriate smoothing is applied.”