Informing Hydrological Drought Response in Headwater Catchments Using Water Storage Estimated From GRACE: Storage-Flow Dynamics

Quantifying the relationship between subsurface water storage and streamflow is challenging due to heterogeneity of surface-groundwater interactions in space and time. Hence, point measurements of storage from wells are insufficient to characterize the storage across a catchment, especially in mountainous environments with complex geology. Here, we present a novel approach to quantify the storage-flow relationship for catchments in the Sierra Nevada Mountains. For 23 gages in the Hydro-Climatic Data Network, the 7-day average annual minimum flow (drought flow) was computed for years 2003 to 2015. We then aggregated, for each gage, the associated storage time-series dataset from 1o gridded measurements of monthly Terrestrial Water Storage (TWS) derived from the Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment (GRACE) satellite mission. Despite the significant mismatch between the spatial scales and temporal resolution, we found a strong empirical correlation between TWS and drought flow. From these relationships, we examined how physical characteristics of each catchment (such as size and geology) impact the observed nonlinear relationship between TWS and drought flow. Furthermore, we show how physical characteristics, such as geology/storage capacity, of catchments affect the sensitivity of decreasing flows to multi-year droughts. This research has the potential to help better quantify the streamflow-storage relationship in small mountainous catchments, as well as, classify catchments that may be more vulnerable to decreasing flows with multi-year droughts.