Long-term groundwater variations in Northwest India from satellite gravity measurements

Satellite gravity data from the Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment (GRACE) provides quantitative measures of terrestrial water storage (TWS) change at large spatial scales. Combining GRACE-observed TWS changes and model estimates of water storage changes in soil and snow at the surface offers a means for measuring groundwater storage change. In this study, we re-assess long-term groundwater storage variation in the Northwest India (NWI) region using an extended record of GRACE time-variable gravity measurements, and a fully unconstrained global forward modeling method. Our new assessments based on the GRACE release-5 (RL05) gravity solutions indicate that during the 10 year period January 2003 to December 2012, the NWI groundwater depletion remains pronounced, especially during the first 5 years (01/2003-12/2007). The newly estimated depletion rates are ~ 20.4 ± 7.1 Gigatonne (Gt)/yr averaged over the 10 year period, and 29.4 ± 8.4 Gt/yr during the first 5 years. The yearly groundwater storage changes in the NWI region are strongly correlated with yearly precipitation anomalies. In 2009, the driest season of the decade, the groundwater depletion reaches nearly 80 Gt, while in the two relatively wet seasons, 2008 and 2011, the groundwater storages even see net increases of about 24 and 35 Gt, respectively. The estimated mean groundwater depletion rates for the first 5 years are significantly higher than previous assessments. The larger depletion rates may reflect the benefits from improved data quality of GRACE RL05 gravity solutions, and improved data processing method, which can more effectively reduce leakage error in GRACE estimates. Our analysis indicates that the neighboring Punjab Province of Pakistan (especially Northern Punjab) apparently also experiences significant groundwater depletion during the same period, which has partly contributed to the new regional groundwater depletion estimates.