GRACE satellite derived total water storage anomaly (TWSA) from April 2002 to December 2014

Full description

The Total Water Storage Anomaly (TWSA) data are derived from the Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment satellite mission, with temporal and spatial resolutions of monthly and 1 degree respectively. The processed GRACE-derived TWSA data covered the period from April 2002 to December 2014.

Related publication: Zunyi Xie, Alfredo Huete, Natalia Restrepo-Coupe, Xuanlong Ma, Rakhesh Devadas, Graziella Caprarelli, Spatial partitioning and temporal evolution of Australia's total water storage under extreme hydroclimatic impacts, Remote Sensing of Environment, Volume 183, 2016, Pages 43-52, ISSN 0034-4257, http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.rse.2016.05.017

Total water storage anomaly data, derived from release-5, level-2 GRACE data, was obtained from NASA's GRACE Tellus wetsite (JPL, 2012) for the Australian continent over the period July 2002 to December 2014. The GRACE TWSA data was pre-processed to remove the
signal from atmosphere and ocean and was retrieved at monthly and 1° resolutions, with units of cm. To minimize the uncertainties associated with data processing, an ensemble average TWSA was calculated using GRACE data processed independently by three research centres, NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), University of Texas Center for Space Research (CSR) and the GeoForschungsZentrum (GFZ) Potsdam. As terrestrial gravity variations in space and time are mainly caused by changes in water storage, TWSA was obtained by subtracting the monthly GRACE data by a historical mean (2004–2009). We chose to use a file of scaling factors obtained from the NCAR's Community Land Model 4.0 (CLM4.0) to correct and restore the GRACE signal loss during low-pass filtering. The uncertainty range in TWSA time series was calculated at a 95% Confidence Interval (CI).

File name example: Au.3Centers.200207.LND.RL05.tif
Au=Australia
3Centers = Original data from three centres download from https://grace.jpl.nasa.gov/data/get-data/monthly-mass-grids-land/
200207 = yyyymm
LND = GRACE land product
RL05 = GRACE land product version 5