Use of GRACE data to monitor climate change-induced variations in water storage availability in the African continent

The Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment (GRACE) data provides direct measurements of temporal mass variations; the latter is largely controlled by variations in water volumes in various reservoirs such as surface water (e.g., lakes and streams), groundwater (e.g., shallow and deep aquifers) and in the soil profile. Climatic changes impact the amounts of precipitation and its partitioning into each of these reservoirs. We explored the use of GRACE data for monitoring climate change-induced variations in water availability in the African continent over a period of nine years and used the identified trends to predict water storage availability across the continent over the next decade. Monthly GRACE gravity field solutions (Center of Space Research [CSR] RL04) in form of Spherical Harmonic Coefficients (SHC's) that span the period from April 2002 through November 2010 were processed (temporal mean was removed, de-striped, smoothed [250 km; Gaussian], and converted to 0.5 x 0.5 deg. equivalent water thicknesses). Several relevant GRACE bi-products (e.g., standard deviation, annual trend) were generated over time periods of six, seven, eight, and nine years and compared (in a GIS environment) with relevant co-registered data sets and derived products (e.g., precipitation, topography, geology, VNIR Landsat, NDVI, stream network distribution, water bodies distribution, watershed boundaries, and Community Climate System Model [CCSM-3] products). Spatial correlations of the co-registered data sets revealed the following: (1) persistent and increasingly pronounced linear annual trends (+ve: increasing mass; -ve: decreasing mass) over periods of six to nine years with the most pronounced trends detected over domains of high signal to noise ratios; (2) +ve trends over the source areas for the Blue Nile basin (4.2 mm/yr) and over the source areas of the Congo basin (7 mm/yr) and over the Zambezi basin (24 mm/yr), whereas -ve trends were detected over Central Africa (-7 mm/yr), the Sahara (-1.5 mm/yr), and the Kalahari desert (-5 mm/yr); (3) +ve annual trends were interpreted to indicate increasing storage in one or more of these reservoirs: soil column, shallow aquifer, and deep aquifer; and (4) assuming that these trends remain constant, we predicted water storage mass-related variations across the continent over the upcoming decade. Findings suggest that GRACE data could be used as cost-effective methodologies to evaluate the impacts of climate change on water availability across large domains and to make futuristic predictions.