Ongoing drought-induced uplift in the western United States

Crustal rebound from water drawdown The ongoing drought across the western United States has taken a toll on underground water storage. Borsa et al. use almost imperceptible crustal uplift to estimate the regional water depletion from the drought. Inverting GPS data maps the impact of the drought on local aquifers over the past few years. The deficit so far in the western United States adds up to 240 gigatons of water, the equivalent of a 10-cm layer across the region. Certain areas of California have fared much worse, with local depletions up to five times the regional average. Science, this issue p. 1587 GPS measurements of crustal rebound in the western U.S. quantify drought-induced regional water depletion. The western United States has been experiencing severe drought since 2013. The solid earth response to the accompanying loss of surface and near-surface water mass should be a broad region of uplift. We use seasonally adjusted time series from continuously operating global positioning system stations to measure this uplift, which we invert to estimate mass loss. The median uplift is 5 millimeters (mm), with values up to 15 mm in California’s mountains. The associated pattern of mass loss, ranging up to 50 centimeters (cm) of water equivalent, is consistent with observed decreases in precipitation and streamflow. We estimate the total deficit to be ~240 gigatons, equivalent to a 10-cm layer of water over the entire region, or the annual mass loss from the Greenland Ice Sheet.

[1]  Y. Bock,et al.  Space geodetic observation of expansion of the San Gabriel Valley, California, aquifer system, during heavy rainfall in winter 2004–2005 , 2007 .

[2]  Duncan Carr Agnew,et al.  SPOTL: Some Programs for Ocean-Tide Loading , 2012 .

[3]  J. Avouac,et al.  Seasonal variations of seismicity and geodetic strain in the Himalaya induced by surface hydrology as revealed from GPS monitoring, seismic monitoring and GRACE measurements , 2007 .

[4]  Robert C. Wolpert,et al.  A Review of the , 1985 .

[5]  G. Blewitt,et al.  Uplift and seismicity driven by groundwater depletion in central California , 2014, Nature.

[6]  Daniel Dzurisin,et al.  Volcano deformation : geodetic monitoring techniques , 2007 .

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

[8]  Guillaume Ramillien,et al.  Detection of Continental Hydrology and Glaciology Signals from GRACE: A Review , 2008 .

[9]  Thomas A. Herring,et al.  Near real‐time monitoring of volcanic surface deformation from GPS measurements at Long Valley Caldera, California , 2013 .

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

[11]  J. Langbein,et al.  Improved stability of a deeply anchored geodetic monument for deformation monitoring , 1995 .

[12]  S. Bettadpur,et al.  Modeling Earth deformation from monsoonal flooding in Bangladesh using hydrographic, GPS, and Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment (GRACE) data , 2010 .

[13]  J. Famiglietti,et al.  A GRACE‐based water storage deficit approach for hydrological drought characterization , 2014 .

[14]  Peter Steigenberger,et al.  Improved Constraints on Models of Glacial Isostatic Adjustment: A Review of the Contribution of Ground-Based Geodetic Observations , 2010 .

[15]  Fred F. Pollitz,et al.  Illumination of rheological mantle heterogeneity by the M7.2 2010 El Mayor‐Cucapah earthquake , 2012 .

[16]  M. Tamisiea,et al.  On seasonal signals in geodetic time series , 2012 .

[17]  Irma J. Terpenning,et al.  STL : A Seasonal-Trend Decomposition Procedure Based on Loess , 1990 .

[18]  Pedro Elosegui,et al.  Geodesy Using the Global Positioning System: The Effects of Signal Scattering , 1995 .

[19]  Valery U. Zavorotny,et al.  GPS Multipath and Its Relation to Near-Surface Soil Moisture Content , 2010, IEEE J. Sel. Top. Appl. Earth Obs. Remote. Sens..

[20]  C. Prigent,et al.  Surface freshwater storage and dynamics in the Amazon basin during the 2005 exceptional drought , 2012 .

[21]  P. Shearer,et al.  Locking depths estimated from geodesy and seismology along the San Andreas Fault System: Implications for seismic moment release , 2011 .

[22]  W. Wan,et al.  Using geodetic GPS receivers to measure vegetation water content , 2015, GPS Solutions.

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

[24]  M. E. Ikehara,et al.  Global positioning system surveying to monitor land subsidence in Sacramento Valley, California, USA , 1994 .

[25]  F. Nievinski,et al.  Snow measurement by GPS interferometric reflectometry: an evaluation at Niwot Ridge, Colorado , 2012 .

[26]  F. Sigmundsson,et al.  Pressure sources versus surface loads: Analyzing volcano deformation signal composition with an application to Hekla volcano, Iceland , 2010 .

[27]  J. Famiglietti,et al.  Estimating snow water equivalent from GPS vertical site-position observations in the western United States , 2013, Water resources research.

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

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

[30]  T. Burbey,et al.  Review: Regional land subsidence accompanying groundwater extraction , 2011 .

[31]  L. Metivier,et al.  The quest for a consistent signal in ground and GRACE gravity time series , 2014 .

[32]  P. Shearer,et al.  Precise relocations and stress change calculations for the Upland earthquake sequence in southern California , 2000 .

[33]  R. Bennett.  Instantaneous deformation from continuous GPS: Contributions from quasi-periodic loads , 2008 .