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Assimilation of GRACE Terrestrial Water Storage Observations into a Land Surface Model for the Assessment of Regional Flood PotentialWe evaluate performance of the Catchment Land Surface Model (CLSM) under flood conditions after the assimilation of observations of the terrestrial water storage anomaly (TWSA) from NASA's Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment (GRACE). Assimilation offers three key benefits for the viability of GRACE observations to operational applications: (1) near-real time analysis; (2) a downscaling of GRACE's coarse spatial resolution; and (3) state disaggregation of the vertically-integrated TWSA. We select the 2011 flood event in the Missouri river basin as a case study, and find that assimilation generally made the model wetter in the months preceding flood. We compare model outputs with observations from 14 USGS groundwater wells to assess improvements after assimilation. Finally, we examine disaggregated water storage information to improve the mechanistic understanding of event generation. Validation establishes that assimilation improved the model skill substantially, increasing regional groundwater anomaly correlation from 0.58 to 0.86. For the 2011 flood event in the Missouri river basin, results show that groundwater and snow water equivalent were contributors to pre-event flood potential, providing spatially-distributed early warning information.
Document ID
20160013875
Acquisition Source
Goddard Space Flight Center
Document Type
Reprint (Version printed in journal)
External Source(s)
Authors
Reager, John T.
(Jet Propulsion Lab., California Inst. of Tech. Pasadena, CA, United States)
Thomas, Alys C.
(California Univ. Irvine, CA, United States)
Sproles, Eric A.
(Ctr. for Advanced Studies in Arid Zones La Serena, Chile)
Rodell, Matthew
(NASA Goddard Space Flight Center Greenbelt, MD, United States)
Beaudoing, Hiroko K.
(Maryland Univ. College Park, MD, United States)
Li, Bailing
(Maryland Univ. College Park, MD, United States)
Famiglietti, James S.
(Jet Propulsion Lab., California Inst. of Tech. Pasadena, CA, United States)
Date Acquired
November 30, 2016
Publication Date
November 5, 2015
Publication Information
Publication: Remote Sensing
Publisher: MDPI AG
Volume: 7
Issue: 11
e-ISSN: 2072-4292
Subject Category
Earth Resources And Remote Sensing
Report/Patent Number
GSFC-E-DAA-TN33456
Funding Number(s)
CONTRACT_GRANT: NNX12AD03A
Distribution Limits
Public
Copyright
Other
Keywords
flood
GRACE
gravity

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