Evapotranspiration Variations in the Mississippi River Basin Estimated From GPS Observations

Evapotranspiration (ET) is one of the key variables in water cycle and ecological systems, whereas it is difficult to quantify ET variations from traditional observations in large river basins, e.g., Mississippi River basin (MRB). In this paper, a new geodetic tool, i.e., Global Positioning System (GPS), is used for the first time to estimate monthly ET variations at a regional scale. Based on the water balance equation, the monthly ET variation is estimated using the GPS-derived terrestrial water storage (TWS) from January 2006 to July 2015 in MRB. The annual amplitude of GPS-inferred TWS in MRB agrees well with the results of Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment. The ET variations from the water balance approach agree well with the land surface modeling and remote sensing data. The correlation of GPS-inferred ET with other ET products is higher than 0.8, which indicates that the GPS-estimated ET well characterizes the ET variations in MRB. The annual amplitude of GPS-inferred ET variations is 47.9 mm/month, which is close to that from land surface modeling of North American Land Data Assimilation System, and a little larger than MODerate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer. The mean monthly ET reaches its maximum in June-July and its minimum in December, which is consistent with the periodic pattern of radiative energy in a year. Furthermore, the ET variations are mainly dominated by the temperature change in MRB.

[1]  S. Islam,et al.  Estimation of surface evaporation map over Southern Great Plains using remote sensing data , 2001 .

[2]  F. Landerer,et al.  Accuracy of scaled GRACE terrestrial water storage estimates , 2012 .

[3]  Felix W. Landerer,et al.  Seasonal variation in total water storage in California inferred from GPS observations of vertical land motion , 2014 .

[4]  P. Webster,et al.  Assessing variability of evapotranspiration over the Ganga river basin using water balance computations , 2014 .

[5]  Shuanggen Jin,et al.  GNSS Remote Sensing: Theory, Methods and Applications , 2013 .

[6]  D. Alsdorf,et al.  Seasonal fluctuations in the mass of the Amazon River system and Earth's elastic response , 2005 .

[7]  Jeffrey T. Freymueller,et al.  Seasonal and long-term vertical deformation in the Nepal Himalaya constrained by GPS and GRACE measurements , 2012 .

[8]  Dan Rosbjerg,et al.  Land-surface modelling in hydrological perspective – a review , 2006 .

[9]  J. Wahr,et al.  The use of GPS horizontals for loading studies, with applications to northern California and southeast Greenland , 2013 .

[10]  M. Watkins,et al.  The gravity recovery and climate experiment: Mission overview and early results , 2004 .

[11]  C. Daly,et al.  Physiographically sensitive mapping of climatological temperature and precipitation across the conterminous United States , 2008 .

[12]  Michael G. Bosilovich,et al.  Water Vapor Tracers as Diagnostics of the Regional Hydrologic Cycle , 2013 .

[13]  W. Farrell.  Deformation of the Earth by surface loads , 1972 .

[14]  Elfatih A. B. Eltahir,et al.  Hydroclimatology of Illinois: A comparison of monthly evaporation estimates based on atmospheric water balance and soil water balance , 1998 .

[15]  E. Noordman,et al.  SEBAL model with remotely sensed data to improve water-resources management under actual field conditions , 2005 .

[16]  P. Webster,et al.  Extended-Range Probabilistic Forecasts of Ganges and Brahmaputra Floods in Bangladesh , 2010 .

[17]  A. Cazenave,et al.  Time variations of the regional evapotranspiration rate from Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment (GRACE) satellite gravimetry , 2006 .

[18]  Eric F. Wood,et al.  An efficient calibration method for continental‐scale land surface modeling , 2008 .

[19]  Hiroko Kato Beaudoing,et al.  Estimating evapotranspiration using an observation based terrestrial water budget , 2011 .

[20]  Pamela L. Nagler,et al.  Predicting riparian evapotranspiration from MODIS vegetation indices and meteorological data , 2005 .

[21]  Shuanggen Jin,et al.  Large-scale variations of global groundwater from satellite gravimetry and hydrological models, 2002–2012 , 2013 .

[22]  B. Scanlon,et al.  Uncertainty in evapotranspiration from land surface modeling, remote sensing, and GRACE satellites , 2014 .

[23]  Shuanggen Jin,et al.  Remote sensing using GNSS signals: Current status and future directions , 2011 .

[24]  S. Running,et al.  A continuous satellite‐derived global record of land surface evapotranspiration from 1983 to 2006 , 2010 .

[25]  M. Cheng,et al.  Variations in the Earth's oblateness during the past 28 years , 2004 .

[26]  S. Swenson,et al.  Post‐processing removal of correlated errors in GRACE data , 2006 .

[27]  Shuanggen Jin,et al.  A Tikhonov regularization method to estimate Earth's oblateness variations from global GPS observations , 2014 .

[28]  Chenghu Zhou,et al.  A Review of Current Methodologies for Regional Evapotranspiration Estimation from Remotely Sensed Data , 2009, Sensors.

[29]  S. Swenson,et al.  Methods for inferring regional surface‐mass anomalies from Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment (GRACE) measurements of time‐variable gravity , 2002 .

[30]  J. D. Tarpley,et al.  The multi‐institution North American Land Data Assimilation System (NLDAS): Utilizing multiple GCIP products and partners in a continental distributed hydrological modeling system , 2004 .

[31]  Matthew Rodell,et al.  Total basin discharge for the Amazon and Mississippi River basins from GRACE and a land‐atmosphere water balance , 2005 .

[32]  A. Mainville,et al.  Assessment of systematic errors in the surface gravity anomalies over North America using the GRACE gravity model , 2008 .

[33]  S. Seneviratne,et al.  Basin scale estimates of evapotranspiration using GRACE and other observations , 2004 .

[34]  J. Eischeid,et al.  Constructing Retrospective Gridded Daily Precipitation and Temperature Datasets for the Conterminous United States , 2008 .

[35]  J. Mitrovica,et al.  Crustal loading near Great Salt Lake, Utah , 2003 .

[36]  J. Ray,et al.  Anomalous harmonics in the spectra of GPS position estimates , 2008 .

[37]  Felix W. Landerer,et al.  GPS as an independent measurement to estimate terrestrial water storage variations in Washington and Oregon , 2015 .

[38]  Maosheng Zhao,et al.  Improvements to a MODIS global terrestrial evapotranspiration algorithm , 2011 .

[39]  Richard P. Hooper,et al.  Flux and Sources of Nutrients in the Mississippi-Atchafalaya River Basin , 1999 .

[40]  C. Daly,et al.  A Statistical-Topographic Model for Mapping Climatological Precipitation over Mountainous Terrain , 1994 .