Testing the use of standardised indices and GRACE satellite data to estimate the European 2015 groundwater drought in near-real time

Van Loon, Anne F.; Kumar, Rohini; Mishra, Vimal

doi:https://doi.org/10.5194/hess-21-1947-2017

Articles | Volume 21, issue 4

https://doi.org/10.5194/hess-21-1947-2017

© Author(s) 2017. This work is distributed under
the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License.

Special issue:

HYPER Droughts (HYdrological Precipitation – Evaporation...

https://doi.org/10.5194/hess-21-1947-2017

© Author(s) 2017. This work is distributed under
the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License.

Articles | Volume 21, issue 4

Research article

|

11 Apr 2017

Research article |

| 11 Apr 2017

Testing the use of standardised indices and GRACE satellite data to estimate the European 2015 groundwater drought in near-real time

Anne F. Van Loon, Rohini Kumar, and Vimal Mishra

Data sets

ENSEMBLES and the European Climate Assessment & Dataset project: E-OBS dataset (v13.0) ENSEMBLES and ECA&D http://www.ecad.eu/download/ensembles/download.php

Groundwater dataset for Bavaria and Baden-Württemberg LfU Bayern and LUBW http://www.glowa-danube.de

GRACE monthly land water mass grids NETCDF, RELEASE 5.0. Ver. 5.0. PO.DAAC S. C. Swenson https://doi.org/10.5067/TELND-NC005

Groundwater dataset for the Netherlands TNO http://www.dinoloket.nl

Short summary

Summer 2015 was extremely dry in Europe, hampering groundwater supply to irrigation and drinking water. For effective management, the groundwater situation should be monitored in real time, but data are not available. We tested two methods to estimate groundwater in near-real time, based on satellite data and using the relationship between rainfall and historic groundwater levels. The second method gave a good spatially variable representation of the 2015 groundwater drought in Europe.