Analysing Five Years of GRACE Equivalent Water Hei

Authors: I M Anjasmara M Kuhn

Publish Date: 2010

Volume: , Issue: , Pages: 547-555

PDF Link

Abstract

In this study we use 59 monthly solutions April 2002–May 2007 of the Earth’s gravity field obtained from the Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment GRACE satellite mission expressed in equivalent water height EWH The GRACEderived EWH values are analysed first in terms of the secular trend and RMSvariability before applying the statisticallybased Principal Component Analysis PCA in order to obtain the most dominant spatial and temporal variations On a global scale we show that only 5 modes can express more than 80 of the total variability including all major hydrological cryospheric and postglacial rebound signals As expected globally the most dominant temporal variation is an annual signal followed by a secular trend Apart from these wellknown signals we show that the PCA is able to reveal other periodic and aperiodic signalsThis study was funded by Australia Partnership Scholarship APSAusAid We thank The Institute of Geoscience Research TIGeR for funds to present this work at the IAG Symposium GGEO2008 We also thank Dr Oliver Baur from the Geodetic Institute of the University of Stuttgart who kindly provided the GRACE mass estimates Finally we would like to thank two anonymous reviewers who helped to considerably improve the original manuscript This is TIGeR publication 169

Keywords: