Low degree spherical harmonic influences on Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment (GRACE) water storage estimates

By Jianli Chen, Matthew Rodell, Clark R. Wilson, James S. Famiglietti. 2005

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We estimate terrestrial water storage variations using time variable gravity changes observed by the Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment (GRACE) satellites during the first 2 years of the mission. We examine how treatment of low‐degree gravitational changes and geocenter variations affect GRACE based estimates of basin‐scale water storage changes, using independently derived low‐degree harmonics from Earth rotation (EOP) and satellite laser ranging (SLR) observations. GRACE based water storage changes are compared with estimates from NASA's Global Land Data Assimilation System (GLDAS). Results from the 22 GRACE monthly gravity solutions, covering the period April 2002 to July 2004, show remarkably good agreement with GLDAS in the Mississippi, Amazon, Ganges, Ob, Zambezi, and Victoria basins. Combining GRACE observations with EOP and SLR degree‐2 spherical harmonic coefficient changes and SLR observed geocenter variations significantly affects and apparently improves the estimates, especially in the Mississippi, Ob, and Victoria basins.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics, Molecular Biology, Oceanography

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/fa4f752b3293b5239cc6ffc001beb5f1c4013a9b

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Citations in the corpus

GRACE detects coseismic and postseismic deformation from the Sumatra‐Andaman earthquake (2007, methodology): “Monthly changes in GRACE global gravity fields are 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; Che”
Detection of Continental Hydrology and Glaciology Signals from GRACE: A Review (2008, background): “... sheets (Velicogna and Wahr 2006a, b; Ramillien et al. 2006a), to quantify water fluxes such as evapotranspiration (Rodell et al. 2004b; Ramillien et al. 2006b), precipitation minus evapotranspiration (Swenson and Wahr 2006a, b) and river discharge (Syed et al. 2005, 2007, 2008a, b), and to quant”
Ensemble prediction and intercomparison analysis of GRACE time‐variable gravity field models (2014, methodology): “CSR 60 30 days 2003–2012 5 GFZ 90 30 days 2003–2012 5 JPL 90 30 days 2003–2012 5 CNES/GRGS 50 10 days 2003–2012 2 limited accuracy with which this parameter can be determined from the GRACE measurements [Chen et al., 2005].”
Estimating geocenter variations from a combination of GRACE and ocean model output (2008, background): “[4] The omission of degree one information can have a significant impact on the recovery of high-latitude mass variability and large-scale interbasin ocean mass exchange [e.g., Chen et al., 2005].”