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 moni- tor total water storage (TWS) changes globally, the impact of spatial distribution of water storage within a basin is gen- erally ignored but may be substantial. In many basins, wa- ter is often stored in reservoirs or lakes, flooded areas, small aquifer systems, and other localized regions with areas typ- ically below GRACE resolution ( 200 000 km 2 ). The ob- jective of this study was to assess the impact of nonuni- form water storage distribution on GRACE estimates of TWS changes as basin-wide averages, focusing on surface water reservoirs and using a priori information on reservoir storage from radar altimetry. Analysis included numerical experiments testing effects of location and areal extent of the localized mass (reservoirs) within a basin on basin-wide average water storage changes, and application to the lower Nile (Lake Nasser) and Tigris- Euphrates basins as examples. Numerical experiments show that by assuming uniform mass distribution, GRACE esti- mates may under- or overestimate basin-wide average water storage by up to a factor of 2, depending on reservoir loca- tion and areal extent. Although reservoirs generally cover less than 1 % of the basin area, and their spatial extent may be unresolved by GRACE, reservoir storage may dominate water storage changes in some basins. For example, reservoir storage ac- counts for 95 % of seasonal water storage changes in the lower Nile and 10 % in the Tigris-Euphrates. Because reser- voirs are used to mitigate droughts and buffer against cli-

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