GRACE water storage estimates for the Middle East and other regions with significant reservoir and lake storage

While GRACE (Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment) satellites are increasingly being used to monitor water storage changes globally, the impact of spatial distribution of water storage within a basin is generally ignored but may be substantial. In many basins, water may be stored in reservoirs, lakes, flooded areas, small aquifer systems, and other localized regions with sizes typically below GRACE resolution. The objective of this study was to assess the impact of non-uniform water storage distribution on GRACE estimates as basin-wide averages, focusing on surface water reservoirs. Analysis included numerical experiments testing the effect of mass size and position within a basin, and application to the Lower Nile (Lake Nasser) and Tigri–Euphrates (TE) basins as examples. Numerical experiments show that by assuming uniform mass distribution, GRACE estimates may under- or over-estimate basin-average water storage by up to a factor of two, depending on reservoir location and extent. Although their spatial extent may be unresolved by GRACE, reservoir storage may dominate in some basins. For example, it accounts for 95% of seasonal variations in the Lower Nile and 10% in the TE basins. Because reservoirs are used to mitigate droughts and buffer against climate extremes, their influence on interannual time scales can be large, for example accounting for 50% of total water storage decline during the 2007–2009 drought in the TE basin. Effects on GRACE estimates are not easily accounted for via simple multiplicative scaling, but in many cases independent information may be available to improve estimates. Accurate estimation of the reservoir contribution is critical, especially when separating groundwater from GRACE total water storage changes. Because the influence of spatially concentrated water storage – and more generally water distribution – is significant, GRACE estimates will be improved when it is possible to combine independent spatial distribution information with GRACE observations, even when reservoir storage is not a major factor. In this regard, data from the upcoming Surface Water Ocean Topography (SWOT) satellite mission should be an especially important companion to GRACE-FO observations.