Can surface pressure be used to remove atmospheric contributions from GRACE data with sufficient accuracy to recover hydrological signals
TLDR
In this paper, the authors estimate errors in analyzed pressure fields and the impact of those errors on GRACE surface mass estimates by comparing analyzed fields with barometric surface pressure measurements in the United States and North Africa/Arabian peninsula.Abstract:
The Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment (GRACE) satellite mission will resolve temporal variations in gravity orders of magnitude more accurately and with considerably higher resolution than any existing satellite. Effects of atmospheric mass over land will be removed prior to estimating the gravitational field, using surface pressure fields generated by global weather forecast centers. To recover the continental hydrological signal with an accuracy of 1 cm of equivalent water thickness down to scales of a few hundred kilometers, atmospheric pressure must be known to an accuracy of 1 mbar or better. We estimate errors in analyzed pressure fields and the impact of those errors on GRACE surface mass estimates by comparing analyzed fields with barometric surface pressure measurements in the United States and North Africa/Arabian peninsula. We consider (1) the error in 30-day averages of the pressure field, significant because the final GRACE product will average measurements collected over 30-day intervals, and (2) the short-period error in the pressure fields which would be aliased by GRACE orbital passes. Because the GRACE results will average surface mass over scales of several hundred kilometers, we assess the pressure field accuracy averaged over those same spatial scales. The atmospheric error over the 30-day averaging period, which will map directly into GRACE data, is generally <0.5 mbar. Consequently, analyzed pressure fields will be adequate to remove the atmospheric contribution from GRACE hydrological estimates to subcentimeter levels. However, the short-period error in the pressure field, which would alias into GRACE data, could potentially contribute errors equivalent to 1 cm of water thickness. We also show that given sufficiently dense barometric coverage, an adequate surface pressure field can be constructed from surface pressure measurements alone.read more
Citations
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The NCEP Climate Forecast System Reanalysis
Suranjana Saha,Shrinivas Moorthi,Hua-Lu Pan,Xingren Wu,Jiande Wang,Sudhir Nadiga,Patrick Tripp,Robert Kistler,John S. Woollen,David Behringer,Haixia Liu,Diane Stokes,Robert Grumbine,George Gayno,Jun Wang,Yu-Tai Hou,Hui-ya Chuang,Hann-Ming Henry Juang,Joe Sela,Mark Iredell,Russ Treadon,Daryl T. Kleist,Paul van Delst,Dennis Keyser,John Derber,Michael Ek,Jesse Meng,Helin Wei,Rongqian Yang,Stephen J. Lord,Huug van den Dool,Arun Kumar,Wanqiu Wang,Craig S. Long,Muthuvel Chelliah,Yan Xue,Boyin Huang,Jae-Kyung E. Schemm,Wesley Ebisuzaki,Roger Lin,Pingping Xie,Mingyue Chen,Shuntai Zhou,Wayne Higgins,Cheng-Zhi Zou,Quanhua Liu,Yong Chen,Yong Han,Lidia Cucurull,Richard W. Reynolds,Glenn Rutledge,Mitch Goldberg +51 more
TL;DR: The NCEP Climate Forecast System Reanalysis (CFSR) was completed for the 31-yr period from 1979 to 2009, in January 2010 as mentioned in this paper, which was designed and executed as a global, high-resolution coupled atmosphere-ocean-land surface-sea ice system to provide the best estimate of the state of these coupled domains over this period.
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References
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