Suchergebnisse

Drought is a complex phenomenon leading to a wide range of socio-economic, environmental, and political problems. The storage-based drought which represents the persistent lack of water in different levels of the Total Water Storage (TWS) from deep groundwater to surface water plays a vital role in proactive drought management. Despite its necessity, TWS could not be monitored due to the lack of consistent measurements from regional to continental scale. Since its launch in 2002, the Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment (grace) mission and its successor GRACE Follow-On have provided unique observations of the TWS change at the global scale. In this study, we have investigated characterizing the storage-based drought at the global scale using GRACE measurements. To this end, the Equivalent Water Height (EWH) has been retrieved from GRACE level 02 solutions. We have addressed the short record of GRACE observations in capturing the full hydroclimate variations. Based on our analysis, regions with a considerable direct human intervention like overexploitation of groundwater in the Middle East, regions that were affected by climate change like ice-melting over the Mackenzie river basin in Canada, or extreme precipitation events over the Ob river basin in the boreal regions are more sensitive to the length of ewh time series. Due to the crucial need for a long (at least 30 years) record of EWH, we have extended GRACE observations back to 1980 using an ensemble of models. The extended dataset has been developed using a pixel-wise selection of best-performed models among global hydrological models, land surface models, and atmospheric reanalysis models. The extended dataset has been used in the study for drought characterization over the grac period. The proposed Storage-based Drought Index (SDI) successfully captured the documented drought events globally in terms of intensity and spatio-temporal distribution. Moreover, the analysis of SDI over the five classes of drought from D0 as abnormally dry to D4 as exceptional drought showed that most regions have suffered at least once from the storage-based drought over the GRACE period (2002–2016). Besides, the map of exceptional drought frequency highlights regions with significant groundwater extraction like California, the Middle East, and north of India and regions with exceptional shifts in the precipitation and temperature pattern and intensity like Amazon in South America and China. Finally, our comparison of SDI with three most widely used drought indices namely the Standardized Precipitation Index (SPI), the Standardized Precipitation Evapotranspiration Index (SPEI), and the Palmer Drought Severity Index (PDSI) reveals that despite their high correlation over climate-driven regions, these indices failed to characterize anthropogenic drought events, especially over regions with considerable groundwater withdraws. The study allows for a more informative storage-based drought with a more robust climatology as the reference, thus enabling a more realistic risk assessment.

Against the backdrop of global change, in terms of both climate and demography, there is a pressing need for monitoring of the global water cycle. The publicly available global database is very limited in its spatial and temporal coverage worldwide. Moreover, the acquisition of in situ data and their delivery to the database have been in decline since the late 1970s, be it for economical or political reasons. Given the insufficient monitoring from in situ gauge networks, and with no outlook for improvement, spaceborne approaches have been under investigation for some years now. Satellite-based Earth observation with its global coverage and homogeneous accuracy has been demonstrated to be a potential alternative to in situ measurements. This paper presents HydroSat as a database containing geometric quantities of the global water cycle from geodetic satellites. HydroSat provides time series and their uncertainty in water level from satellite altimetry, surface water extent from satellite imagery, terrestrial water storage anomaly represented in equivalent water height from satellite gravimetry, lake and reservoir water volume anomaly from a combination of satellite altimetry and imagery, and river discharge from either satellite altimetry or imagery. The spatial and temporal coverage of these datasets varies and depends on the availability of geodetic satellites. These products, which are complementary to existing products, can contribute to our understanding of the global water cycle within the Earth system in several ways. They can be incorporated for hydrological modeling, they can be complementary to current and future spaceborne observations, and they can define indicators of the past and future state of the global freshwater system. HydroSat is publicly available through http://hydrosat.gis.uni-stuttgart.de (last access: 18 May 2022). Moreover, a snapshot of all the data (taken in April 2021) is available in GFZ Data Services at https://doi.org/10.5880/fidgeo.2021.017 ( Tourian et al. , 2021 ) .

Against the backdrop of global change, in terms of both climate and demography, there is a pressing need for monitoring of the global water cycle. The publicly available global database is very limited in its spatial and temporal coverage worldwide. Moreover, the acquisition of in situ data and their delivery to the database have been in decline since the late 1970s, be it for economical or political reasons. Given the insufficient monitoring from in situ gauge networks, and with no outlook for improvement, spaceborne approaches have been under investigation for some years now. Satellite-based Earth observation with its global coverage and homogeneous accuracy has been demonstrated to be a potential alternative to in situ measurements. This paper presents HydroSat as a database containing geometric quantities of the global water cycle from geodetic satellites. HydroSat provides time series and their uncertainty in water level from satellite altimetry, surface water extent from satellite imagery, terrestrial water storage anomaly represented in equivalent water height from satellite gravimetry, lake and reservoir water volume anomaly from a combination of satellite altimetry and imagery, and river discharge from either satellite altimetry or imagery. The spatial and temporal coverage of these datasets varies and depends on the availability of geodetic satellites. These products, which are complementary to existing products, can contribute to our understanding of the global water cycle within the Earth system in several ways. They can be incorporated for hydrological modeling, they can be complementary to current and future spaceborne observations, and they can define indicators of the past and future state of the global freshwater system. HydroSat is publicly available through http://hydrosat.gis.uni-stuttgart.de (last access: 18 May 2022). Moreover, a snapshot of all the data (taken in April 2021) is available in GFZ Data Services at https://doi.org/10.5880/fidgeo.2021.017 (Tourian et al., 2021).

Against the backdrop of global change, both in terms of climate and demography, there is a pressing need for monitoring the global water cycle. The publicly available global database is very limited in its spatial and temporal coverage worldwide. Moreover, the acquisition of in situ data and their delivery to the database are in decline since the late 1970s, be it for economical or political reasons. Given the insufficient monitoring from in situ gauge networks, and with no outlook for improvement, spaceborne approaches have been under investigation for some years now. Satellite-based Earth observation with its global coverage and homogeneous accuracy has been demonstrated to be a potential alternative to in situ measurements. This paper presents HydroSat as a repository of global water cycle products from spaceborne geodetic sensors. HydroSat provides time series and their uncertainty of: water level from satellite altimetry, surface water extent from satellite imagery, terrestrial water storage anomaly from satellite gravimetry, lake and reservoir water storage anomaly from a combination of satellite altimetry and imagery, and river discharge from either satellite altimetry or imagery. These products can contribute to understanding the global water cycle within the Earth system in several ways. They can act as inputs to hydrological models, they can play a complementary role to current and future spaceborne observations, and they can define indicators of the past and future state of the global freshwater system. The repository is publicly available through http://hydrosat.gis.uni-stuttgart.de .