Continental Water Storage For Space Geodesy Studies: Comparison of Global Soil Moisture, Groundwater and Snow Depth Grids
Abstract
Recent developments in space geodesy allow determination of gravity field temporal variations, geocenter motion, vertical crustal motions, global sea level change, etc. On interannual time scale, mass redistribution among atmosphere, oceans and continental water reservoirs is the main contributor to the observed variations. To validate and interpret the geodetic results, surface mass redistribution is generally computed using outputs of global atmospheric, oceanic and hydrological models. However, except for atmospheric mass redistribution precisely determined from surface pressure fields, ocean mass and continental water storage (both liquid and solid) considerably vary from one model to another. Here we focus on global continental water storage and compare global grids of soil moisture, ground waters and snow depth available from several recent models. We perform EOF analyses on these global fields to bring out the spatio temporal characteristics of each field and discuss their differences. We finally estimate what kind of effects the observed differences have on the geodetic parameters.
- Publication:
-
EGS General Assembly Conference Abstracts
- Pub Date:
- 2002
- Bibcode:
- 2002EGSGA..27.6644G