|
GRACE-FO Shows the Weight of Midwestern Floods In
May 2019, after the wettest 12 months ever recorded in the Mississippi River
Basin, the region was bearing the weight of 8 to 12 inches (200 to 300
millimeters) more water than average. New data from NASA's Gravity Recovery and
Climate Experiment Follow-On (GRACE-FO) mission, which launched in May 2018, showed that there was an increase
in water storage in the river basin, extending east around the Great Lakes.
Data
from the twin GRACE-FO spacecraft are used to measure the change in the mass of
water across the planet, providing
scientists, decision makers and resource managers with an accurate measure of
how much water is retained - not only on Earth's surface,
but also in the soil layer and below ground in aquifers. Monitoring these changes
provides a unique perspective of Earth's climate and has far-reaching benefits
for humankind, such as understanding both the possibility and the consequences
of floods and droughts.
GRACE-FO
data will soon be incorporated into the weekly U.S. Drought Monitor
maps, an important tool for tracking drought across the United
States. Agricultural
drought depends not only on rainfall, but also on the quantity and extent of underground
water available to plant roots and irrigation. GRACE-FO's estimates of
subsurface water are critical to crop and water management.
The
mission also measures mass changes in the thick ice sheets of Greenland and
Antarctica. The May 2019 GRACE-FO map of Greenland shows that most of the
island continued its long-term trend of ice mass loss. GRACE-FO data from June
2018 through early 2019 (see black-and-white graph) indicate a recent slowdown in Greenland ice loss that has also been observed
in data from NASA's Oceans Melting Greenland airborne campaign. This slowdown
has been attributed to cooler ocean waters around Greenland for the last few
years.
The
GRACE-FO science team is now looking at June 2019 data to assess how the unusually warm weather and rapid ice
loss this
summer will affect that trend. Greenland's significant ice melt in June and
July this year was similar to the strong melting that occurred in the summer of
2012 and led to significant ice loss.
GRACE-FO
launched about a year after the predecessor GRACE mission ceased operations
following 15 years in space. "The Earth's climate
system has been doing interesting things since we last had observations from
the original GRACE mission," said Felix Landerer, the GRACE-FO project scientist
at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California. "The new
GRACE-FO data provide us with crucial information about the changes that are
occurring around us. We're excited to be able to make this high-quality data
set available to the scientific community."
GRACE-FO is a partnership between NASA and the German
Research Centre for Geosciences (GFZ). The twin GRACE-FO spacecraft are
operated from the German Space Operations Center in Oberpfaffenhofen, Germany,
under a GFZ contract with the German Aerospace Center (DLR). JPL manages the
mission for NASA's Earth Science Division in the Science Mission Directorate at
NASA Headquarters in Washington. Caltech in Pasadena, California, manages JPL
for NASA.
For more information about GRACE-FO, see:
https://www.nasa.gov/gracefo
https://gracefo.jpl.nasa.gov/
|
