Terrestrial water storage changes over the Pearl River Basin from GRACE and connections with Pacific climate variability

Time-variable gravity data from the Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment （GRACE） satellite mission are used to study terrestrial water storage （TWS） changes over the Pearl River Basin （PRB） for the period 2003-Nov. 2014. TWS estimates from GRACE generally show good agreement with those from two hydrological models GLDAS and WGHM. But they show different capability of detecting significant TWS changes over the PRB. Among them, WGHM is likely to underestimate the seasonal variability of TWS, while GRACE detects long- term water depletions over the upper PRB as was done by hydrological models, and observes significant water increases around the Longtan Reservoir （LTR） due to water impoundment. The heavy drought in 2011 caused by the persistent precipitation deficit has resulted in extreme low surface runoff and water level of the LTR. Moreover, large variability of summer and autumn precipitation may easily trigger floods and droughts in the rainy season in the PRB, especially for summer, as a high correlation of 0.89 was found between precipitation and surface runoff. Generally, the PRB TWS was negatively correlated with El Nifio-Southern Oscillation （ENSO） events. However, the modulation of the Pacific Decadal Oscillation （PDO） may impact this relationship, and the significant TWS anomaly was likely to occur in the peak of PDO phase as they agree well in both of the magnitude and timing of peaks. This indicates that GRACE-based TWS could be a valuable parameter for studying climatic in- fluences in the PRB.

GRACE-based estimates of water discharge over the Yellow River basin

As critical component of hydrologic cycle, basin discharge is a key issue for understanding the hydrological and climatologic related to water and energy cycles. Combining GRACE gravity field models with ET from GLDAS models and precipitation from GPCP, discharge of the Yellow River basin are estimated from the water balance equation. While comparing the results with discharge from GLDAS model and in situ measurements, the results reveal that discharge from Mosaic and CLM GLDAS model can partially represent the river discharge and the discharge estimation from water balance equation could reflect the discharge from precipitation over the Yellow River basin.

Seasonal gravity changes estimated from GRACE data

Since 2002, the GRACE program has provided a large amount of high-precision data, which can be used to detect temporal gravity variations related to global mass re-distribution inside the fluid envelop of the surface of the Earth. In order to make use of the GRACE data to investigate earthquake-related gravity changes in China, we first studied the degree variances of the monthly GRACE gravity field models, and then applied decorrelation and Gaussian smoothing method to obtain seasonal gravity changes in China. By deducting the multi-year mean seasonal variations from the seasonal maos,we found some earthouake-related gravity anomalies.

Detecting Droughts in Southwest China from GPS Vertical Position Displacements

The solid Earth responds elastically to terrestrial water storage(TWS)changes.Here global positioning system(GPS)vertical position data at 31 stations from the crustal movement observation network of China(CMONOC)from August 2010 to December 2016 are used to detect droughts in Southwest China.Monthly GPS vertical position displacements respond negatively to precipitation changes and TWS changes observed by gravity recovery and climate experiments(GRACE)as well as river water level variations.GPS vertical position anomalies(the non-seasonal term)are well correlated negatively(correlations of about-0.70)with the commonly used meteorological composite index(CI)in China and the GRACE drought severity index(GRACE-DSI),but less correlated with the standardized precipitation evapotranspiration index(SPEI).Compared to CI,GPS vertical position anomalies have the advantage of detecting droughts caused by abrupt precipitation deficits in a short time.GRACE-DSI is less accurate in drought monitoring for some periods due to the missing data,while the severity of abrupt precipitation absent in some cases can be overestimated from SPEI with big variability.This study shows the reliability and advantages of GPS data in drought monitoring.

Far-zone contributions of airborne gravity anomalies' upward/downward continuation

Airborne gravimetry has become a vital technique in local gravity field approximation, and upward/downward continuation of gravity data is a key process of airborne gravimetry. In these procedures, the integral domain is divided into two parts, namely the near-zone and the far-zone. The far-zone contributions are approximated by the truncation coefficients and a global geo-potential model, and their values are controlled by several issues. This paper investigates the effects of flight height, the size of near-zone cap, and Remove- Compute-Restore （RCR） technique upon far-zone contributions. Results show that at mountainous area the far-zone contributions can be ignored when EIGEN-6C of 360 degree is removed from the gravity data, together with a near-zone cap of 1°and a flight height less than 10 km, while at flat area EIGEN-6C of 180 degree is feasible.

Insight into Urban Faults by Wavelet Multi-Scale Analysis and Modeling of Gravity Data in Shenzhen,China

Urban faults in Shenzhen are potential threats to city security and sustainable development. In consideration of the importance of the Shenzhen fault zone, the author provide a detailed interpretation on gravity data model. Bouguer gravity covering the whole Shenzhen City was calculated with a 1-km resolution. Wavelet multi-scale analysis（MSA） was applied to the Bouguer gravity data to obtain the multilayer residual anomalies corresponding to different depths. In addition, 2D gravity models were constructed along three profiles. The Bouguer gravity anomaly shows an NE-striking high-low-high pattern from northwest to southeast, strongly related to the main faults. According to the results of MSA, the correlation between gravity anomaly and faults is particularly significant from 4 to 12 km depth. The residual gravity with small amplitude in each layer indicates weak tectonic activity in the crust. In the upper layers, positive anomalies along most of faults reveal the upwelling of high-density materials during the past tectonic movements. The multilayer residual anomalies also yield important information about the faults, such as the vertical extension and the dip direction. The maximum depth of the faults is about 20 km. In general, NE-striking faults extend deeper than NW-striking faults and have a larger dip angle.

Investigation of the Tikhonov Regularization Method in Regional Gravity Field Modeling by Poisson Wavelets Radial Basis Functions

The application of Tikhonov regularization method dealing with the ill-conditioned problems in the regional gravity field modeling by Poisson wavelets is studied. In particular, the choices of the regularization matrices as well as the approaches for estimating the regularization parameters are investigated in details. The numerical results show that the regularized solutions derived from the first-order regularization are better than the ones obtained from zero-order regularization. For cross validation, the optimal regularization parameters are estimated from L-curve, variance component estimation（VCE） and minimum standard deviation（MSTD） approach, respectively, and the results show that the derived regularization parameters from different methods are consistent with each other. Together with the firstorder Tikhonov regularization and VCE method, the optimal network of Poisson wavelets is derived, based on which the local gravimetric geoid is computed. The accuracy of the corresponding gravimetric geoid reaches 1.1 cm in Netherlands, which validates the reliability of using Tikhonov regularization method in tackling the ill-conditioned problem for regional gravity field modeling.