Monitoring Changes in Continental Water Storage with GRACE |
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Authors: | Swenson Sean Wahr John |
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Institution: | (1) Department of Physics and Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences, University of Colorado, Boulder, Colorado, USA |
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Abstract: | The Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment, GRACE , will enable the recovery of monthly estimates of changes in water storage,
on land and in the ocean, averaged over arbitrary regions having length scales of a few hundred km and larger. These data
will allow the examination of changes in the distribution of water in the ocean, in snow and ice on polar ice sheets, and
in continental water and snow storage. Extracting changes in water storage from the GRACE dataset requires the use of averaging
kernels which can isolate a particular region. To estimate the accuracy to which continental water storage changes in a few
representative regions may be recovered, we construct a synthetic GRACE dataset from global, gridded models of surface-mass
variability. We find that regional changes in water storage can be recovered with rms error less than 1 cm of equivalent water
thickness, for regions having areas of 4 × 105 km2 and larger. Signals in smaller regions may also be recovered; however, interpretations of such results require a careful
consideration of model resolution, as well as the nature of the averaging kernel.
This revised version was published online in August 2006 with corrections to the Cover Date. |
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