EOF Analysis on the Variations of Continental Water Storage from GRACE in China

Abstract

The GRACE satellite mission has provided the Earth's gravity field models for more than four years by the end of October, 2006, which is in form of spherical harmonic coefficients. They are useful to infer variation of continental water storage in large scale. In this paper, the Empirical orthogonal functions (EOF) are used to analyze the time series of J2 inferred from GRACE and SLR respectively to see the characteristics and the differences between the two time series. With 50 monthly models of the Earth's gravity field (from August, 2002 to October, 2006) from Center for Space Research, University of Texas at Austin (UTCSR), the variations of continental water storage in China are computed. Meanwhile, EOF is used to analyze the water storage anomalies to get the characteristics of variation. The annual amplitudes in Yangtze River basin and Yellow River basin are derived with EOF reconstruction, respectively. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2009.