Samuel A. Andam-Akorful

Estimating Total Discharge in the Yangtze River Basin Using Satellite-Based Observations

The measurement of total basin discharge along coastal regions is necessary for understanding the hydrological and oceanographic issues related to the water and energy cycles. However, only the observed streamflow (gauge-based observation) is used to estimate the total fluxes from the river basin to the ocean, neglecting the portion of discharge that infiltrates to underground and directly discharges into the ocean. Hence, the aim of this study is to assess the total discharge of the Yangtze River (Chang Jiang) basin. In this study, we explore the potential response of total discharge to changes in precipitation (from the Tropical Rainfall Measuring Mission—TRMM), evaporation (from four versions of the Global Land Data Assimilation—GLDAS, namely, CLM, Mosaic, Noah and VIC), and water-storage changes (from the Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment—GRACE) by using the terrestrial water budget method. This method has been validated by comparison with the observed streamflow, and shows an agreement with a root mean square error (RMSE) of 14.30 mm/month for GRACE-based discharge and 20.98 mm/month for that derived from precipitation minus evaporation (P − E). This improvement of approximately 32% indicates that monthly terrestrial water-storage changes, as estimated by GRACE, cannot be considered negligible over Yangtze basin. The results for the proposed method are more accurate than the results previously reported in the literature.

MONITORING MASS CHANGES IN THE VOLTA RIVER BASIN USING GRACE SATELLITE GRAVITY AND TRMM PRECIPITATION

GRACE satellite gravity data was used to estimate mass changes within the Volta River basin in West African for the period of January, 2005 to December, 2010. We also used the precipitation data from the Tropical Rainfall Measurement Mission (TRMM) to determine relative contributions source to the seasonal hydrological balance within the Volta River basin. We found out that the seasonal mass change tends to be detected by GRACE for periods from 1 month in the south to 4 months in the north of the basin after the rainfall events. The results suggested a significant gain in water storage in the basin at reference epoch 2007.5 and a dominant annual cycle for the period under consideration for both in the mass changes and rainfall time series. However, there was a low correlation between mass changes and rainfall implying that there must be other processes which cause mass changes without rainfall in the upstream of the Volta River basin.

The performance of bds relative positioning usage with real observation data

With the first phase of COMPASS/BeiDou-2 (BDS) completed, the assessment of positioning performance and the characterization of its system are analyzed and presented. Pseudo-range and carrier phase measurements modulated on B1 and B2 have been collected in Shanghai, from 00:00 to 24:00 on 28 December, 2012. Compared with GPS, visibility and measurement quality of BDS’s GEO, IGSO and MEO satellites are analyzed. DOP during the whole orbital period is also analyzed the results demonstrate that BDS’s HDOP is better than GPS’s one, but VDOP opposite. Furthermore, the result of positioning is also presented and analyzed. Short baselines are estimated by standalone BDS and GPS’s carrier phase measurement, respectively, using 48 segmentations of observations during a whole day (24 hours, each segmentation, is about 30 minutes observation). The analysis of static relative positioning demonstrates that BDS could achieve to millimeter level, corresponding to GPS. Kinematic result is produced by double differenced carrier phase observations with the ambiguities fixed under the constraint of precise short baseline.The result shows that the centimeter accuracy could be achieved. When comparing the results of kinematic baseline solutions, performance of BDS is worse than GPS on North and Up components, but oppositely on the component of East in the kinematic baseline processing.