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Increased water storage in North America and Scandinavia from GRACE gravity data

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Abstract

Space-borne gravity data from the Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment (GRACE) have revealed trends in present-day continental water storage in many parts of the world. In North America and northern Europe, it has been difficult to provide reliable estimates because of the strong background signals of glacial isostatic adjustment1. Attempts to separate the hydrologic signal from the background with numerical models2 are affected by uncertainties in our understanding of the precise glacial history and mantle viscosity3,4. Here we use a combination of GRACE data and measurements from the global positioning system to separate the hydrological signals without any model assumptions. According to our estimates, water storage in central North America increased by 43.0±5.0 Gt yr−1 over the past decade. We attribute this increase to a recovery in terrestrial water storage after the extreme Canadian Prairies drought between 1999 and 2005. We find a smaller rise in water storage in southern Scandinavia, by 2.3±0.8 Gt yr−1. In both North America and Scandinavia, our computed increases in water storage are consistent with long-term observations of terrestrial water level. We suggest that the detected mass gains in terrestrial water storage need to be taken into account in studies on global sea-level rise.

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Figure 1: Hydrology trend rates in North America in equivalent water thickness.
Figure 2: Hydrology trend rates in Fennoscandia in equivalent water thickness.
Figure 3: Terrestrial water storage variations and trend from GRACE, terrestrial observations and hydrology models.

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Acknowledgements

H.W. is supported by the National Science Foundation for Distinguished Young Scholars of China (grant No. 40825012), National Key Basic Research Program of China (973 Program, grant No. 2012CB957703), National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant Nos 41021003, 41174016, 41274026 and 41204013) and CAS/SAFEA International Partnership Program for Creative Research Teams (Grant No. KZZD-EW-TZ-05). P.W. is supported by an Operating Grant from NSERC of Canada. L. Jiang is supported by the Hundred Talents Program of the Chinese Academy of Sciences. The authors thank A. Güntner for providing WGHM data, R. Walcer (Saskatchewan Watershed Authority) for providing groundwater well data in Saskatchewan, the Geological Survey of Sweden for providing groundwater well data in southern Sweden, J. Pomeroy and M. Lidberg for discussion and L. Bentley for improving the manuscript. Some figures are drawn with the GMT software.

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Contributions

H.W. formulated the project and wrote the paper. L. Jia derived the formulae and conducted the computation. H.S. and P.W. participated in work formulation and the analysis of the results, and polished the manuscript. H.S. analysed the terrestrial data sets. H.H. formulated part of the project. L. Jiang and L.X. contributed to the simulated separation. Z.W. and B.H. contributed to the post-processing of the GRACE data. All authors read the manuscript and discussed the results.

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Correspondence to Hansheng Wang.

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The authors declare no competing financial interests.

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Wang, H., Jia, L., Steffen, H. et al. Increased water storage in North America and Scandinavia from GRACE gravity data. Nature Geosci 6, 38–42 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1038/ngeo1652

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