GlobalMass team member Maike Schumacher is co-author on two new papers published in Advances in Water Resources.
In the first, (‘Assessing sequential data assimilation techniques for integrating GRACE data into a hydrological model‘) the authors use terrestrial water storage data products from the Gravity Recovery And Climate Experiment (GRACE) to improve estimations from a hydrological model. The performance of different data assimilation techniques is assessed for incorporating the data into the World-Wide Water Resources Assessment (W3RA) model.
Independent in-situ measurements of groundwater level from the Murray-Darling Basin, Australia, are used to evaluate the results. The results indicate that all of the assessed techniques improve the estimation of water storage by the W3RA model, with the best results decreasing modelled groundwater estimation errors by over 30%.
In the second, (‘Accounting for spatial correlation errors in the assimilation of GRACE into hydrological models through localization‘), GRACE terrestrial water storage data is assimilated into the World-Wide Water Resources Assessment system (W3RA) over the whole Australian continent. The GRACE data is applied with different spatial resolutions including 1° to 5° grids, as well as basin averages.
For each spatial scale, the performance of the data assimilation is assessed through comparison with independent in-situ groundwater and soil moisture observations. Overall, the results demonstrate that the approach developed leads to less errors for all spatial scales considered compared to groundwater measurements.