COP-22: The Weight of Water: NASA’s GRACE Satellite Mission

Primary Sponsor: National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA)
Event Summary: Monitoring of the world’s water resources is challenging due to limited large scale observations, particularly a lack of observations of water beneath the land surface. NASA’s Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment (GRACE) mission provides an unprecedented view of the regional net terrestrial water balance, with global coverage, over a now ~10 year record. This event will highlight some relationships between terrestrial water storage and other water balance variables (precipitation and runoff), as well as applications of the GRACE observations in drought monitoring, flood identification and long-lead-time flood prediction. The use of satellite-based gravity to monitor the world’s water resources is a relevant application that will be featured in this event. Additionally, the event will showcase recent work on measuring the land contributions to sea level rise, and on the potential for GRACE to inform land surface model design and storage behavior. Finally, the event will conclude with some future directions including SMAP and GRACE, and regional hydrological model development at JPL.