Water storage changes in North America retrieved from GRACE gravity and GPS data

As global warming continues, the monitoring of changes in terrestrial water storage becomes increasingly important since it plays a critical role in understanding global change and water resource management. In North America as elsewhere in the world, changes in water resources strongly impact agriculture and animal husbandry. From a combination of Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment (GRACE) gravity and Global Positioning System (GPS) data, it is recently found that water storage from August, 2002 to March, 2011 recovered after the extreme Canadian Prairies drought between 1999 and 2005. In this paper, we use GRACE monthly gravity data of Release 5 to track the water storage change from August, 2002 to June, 2014. In Canadian Prairies and the Great Lakes areas, the total water storage is found to have increased during the last decade by a rate of 73.8 ± 14.5 Gt/a, which is larger than that found in the previous study due to the longer time span of GRACE observations used and the reduction of the leakage error. We also find a long term decrease of water storage at a rate of −12.0 ± 4.2 Gt/a in Ungava Peninsula, possibly due to permafrost degradation and less snow accumulation during the winter in the region. In addition, the effect of total mass gain in the surveyed area, on present-day sea level, amounts to −0.18 mm/a, and thus should be taken into account in studies of global sea level change.