Fri Apr 10, F. Flechtner
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Hacker, Charlotte, Gutknecht, Benjamin D., Löcher, Anno, and Kusche, Jürgen, 2026. Multidecadal reconstruction of terrestrial water storage changes by combining pre–GRACE satellite observations and climate data. Earth System Science Data, 18(3):1747–1781, doi:10.5194/essd-18-1747-2026.
• from the NASA Astrophysics Data System • by the DOI System •
@ARTICLE{2026ESSD...18.1747H,
author = {{Hacker}, Charlotte and {Gutknecht}, Benjamin D. and {L{\"o}cher}, Anno and {Kusche}, J{\"u}rgen},
title = "{Multidecadal reconstruction of terrestrial water storage changes by combining pre-GRACE satellite observations and climate data}",
journal = {Earth System Science Data},
year = 2026,
month = mar,
volume = {18},
number = {3},
pages = {1747-1781},
abstract = "{The Gravity Recovery And Climate Experiment (GRACE) and its follow-on
mission, GRACE-FO, have observed global mass changes and
transports, expressed as terrestrial water storage anomalies
(TWSA), for over two decades. However, for climate model
evaluation, climate change attribution and other applications,
multi-decadal TWSA time series are required. This need has
triggered several studies on reconstructing TWSA via regression
approaches or machine learning techniques, with the help of
predictor variables such as rainfall, land or sea surface
temperature. Here, we combine such an approach, for the first
time, with large-scale time-variable gravity information from
geodetic satellite laser ranging (SLR) and Doppler Orbitography
by Radiopositioning Integrated on Satellite (DORIS) tracking.
The new reconstruction TWSTORE (Terrestrial Water STOrage
REconstruction) is formulated in a GRACE-derived empirical
orthogonal functions (EOFs) basis and complemented with the
L{\"o}cher et al. (2025) approach, in which global gravity
fields are solved from SLR ranges and DORIS observations in EOF
space for the pre-GRACE time frame. Our approach is highly
modular, allowing to use different data sets at several steps in
the workflow. We reconstruct GRACE-like TWSA for the global
land, excluding Greenland and Antarctica, from 1984 onward. We
find that the new combined reconstruction inherits information
from the geodetic method, mainly at longer timescales. In
contrast, at the seasonal scale, the climate-driven
reconstruction and the geodetic product are already surprisingly
consistent. In comparison to other reconstructions, we find thus
major differences mainly at the multi-decadal timescale. All in
all, our study confirms the presence of significant changes in
storage trends, showing that GRACE-derived results should not be
extrapolated to the past. The reconstructed fields and
corresponding uncertainty information are available at
10.5281/zenodo.15827789 . We also derive evaporation based on
the water balance equation and the presented reconstruction for
11 river basins. The corresponding time series are available at
10.5281/zenodo.16643628 .}",
doi = {10.5194/essd-18-1747-2026},
adsurl = {https://ui.adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2026ESSD...18.1747H},
adsnote = {Provided by the SAO/NASA Astrophysics Data System}
}
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Fri Apr 10, F. Flechtner