Assimilation of GRACE Terrestrial Water Storage Data into a Land Surface Model: Results for the Mississippi River Basin

Abstract

Assimilation of data from the Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment (GRACE) system of satellites yielded improved simulation of water storage and fluxes in the Mississippi River basin, as evaluated against independent measurements. The authors assimilated GRACE-derived monthly terrestrial water storage (TWS) anomalies for each of the four major subbasins of the Mississippi into the Catchment Land Surface Model (CLSM) using an ensemble Kalman smoother from January 2003 to May 2006. Compared with the open-loop CLSM simulation, assimilation estimates of groundwater variability exhibited enhanced skill with respect to measured groundwater in all four subbasins. Assimilation also significantly increased the correlation between simulated TWS and gauged river flow for all four subbasins and for the Mississippi River itself. In addition, model performance was evaluated for eight smaller watersheds within the Mississippi basin, all of which are smaller than the scale of GRACE observations. In seven of eight cases, GRACE assimilation led to increased correlation between TWS estimates and gauged river flow, indicating that data assimilation has considerable potential to downscale GRACE data for hydrological applications.