Quantifying Multi-Source Uncertainties in GRACE-Based Estimates of Groundwater Storage Changes in Mainland China

Abstract

The Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment (GRACE) satellites have been widely used to estimate groundwater storage (GWS) changes, yet their uncertainties related to the multi-source datasets used are rarely investigated. This study focuses on quantifying the uncertainties of GRACE GWS estimates in mainland China during 2003–2015, by generating a total of 3456 solutions from the combinations of multiple GRACE products and auxiliary datasets. The Bayesian model averaging (BMA) approach is used to derive the optimal estimates of GWS changes under an uncertainty framework. Ten river basins are further identified to analyze the estimated annual GWS trends and uncertainty magnitudes. On average, our results show that the BMA-estimated annual GWS trend in mainland China is −1.93 mm/yr, whereas its uncertainty reaches 4.50 mm/yr. Albeit the estimated annual GWS trends and uncertainties vary across river basins, we found that the high uncertainties of annual GWS trends are tied to the large differences between multiple GRACE data and soil moisture products used in the GWS solutions. These findings highlight the importance of paying more attention to the existence of multi-source uncertainties when using GRACE data to estimate GWS changes.