A12D-03:
Application of Assimilated GRACE Data for Drought Monitoring
Monday, 15 December 2014: 10:44 AM
Matthew Rodell1, Bailing Li1, Hiroko K Beaudoing1,2, Benjamin F Zaitchik3 and James S Famiglietti4,5, (1)NASA/GSFC, Greenbelt, MD, United States, (2)Earth System Science Interdisciplinary Center, University of Maryland, College Park, MD, United States, (3)Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, MD, United States, (4)NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, CA, United States, (5)University of California Irvine, Irvine, CA, United States
Abstract:
A unique aspect of the Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment (GRACE) satellites is their ability to detect changes in water stored in all levels of the soil column, including groundwater. Thus GRACE is well suited for identifying hydrological droughts, when total water storage is low. The potential for GRACE to contribute to global drought monitoring is clear, but first it is necessary to overcome GRACE’s low spatial and temporal resolutions (relative to other hydrological observations) and data latency. To do so we synthesize GRACE data with other ground and space based meteorological observations within a sophisticated numerical model of land surface water and energy processes. The resulting high resolution, near real-time fields of soil moisture and groundwater storage variations are then used to generate drought indicator maps. Since 2011, such maps have been produced on a weekly basis for the continental U.S., disseminated through the University of Nebraska’s National Drought Mitigation Center website, and incorporated into the U.S. and North American Drought Monitors. Expansion of these GRACE-based drought indicators to the global scale is ongoing and is expect to be completed over the next 12-18 months.
