W. van der Wal

Detectability of groundwater storage change within the Great Lakes Water Basin using GRACE

Groundwater is a primary hydrological reservoir of the Great Lakes Water Basin (GLB), which is an important region to both Canada and US in terms of culture, society and economy. Due to insufficient observations, there is a knowledge gap about groundwater storage variation and its interaction with the Great Lakes. The objective of this study is to examine the detectability of the groundwater storage change within the GLB using the monthly models from the Gravity Recovery And Climate Experiment (GRACE) satellite mission, auxiliary soil moisture, snow and lake (SMSL) data, and predictions from glacial isostatic adjustment (GIA) models. A two-step filtering method is developed to optimize the extraction of GRACE signal. A two dimensional basin window weight function is also introduced to reduce ringing artifacts caused by the band-limited GRACE models in estimating the water storage change within the GLB. The groundwater storage (GWS) as deviation from a reference mean storage is estimated for the period of 2002 to 2009. The average GWS of the GLB clearly show an annual cycle with an amplitude range from 27 to 91 mm in water thickness equivalent (WTE), and a phase range of about two months. The estimated phases of GWS variations have a half year shift with respect to the phase of SMSL water storage variations which show peaks in March and April. The least squares estimation gives a GWS loss trend of from 2.3 to 9.3 km3/yr within the GLB for the period of study. This wide range of the GRACE GWS results is caused largely by the differences of soil moisture and snow storage from different land surface models (LSMs), and to a lesser extent by the GRACE commission and omission errors, and the GIA model error.

Glacial isostatic adjustment in the static gravity field of Fennoscandia

In the central part of Fennoscandia, the crust is currently rising, because of the delayed response of the viscous mantle to melting of the Late Pleistocene ice sheet. This process, called Glacial Isostatic Adjustment (GIA), causes a negative anomaly in the present-day static gravity field as isostatic equilibrium has not been reached yet. Several studies have tried to use this anomaly as a constraint on models of GIA, but the uncertainty in crustal and upper mantle structures has not been fully taken into account. Therefore, our aim is to revisit this using improved crustal models and compensation techniques. We find that in contrast with other studies, the effect of crustal anomalies on the gravity field cannot be effectively removed, because of uncertainties in the crustal and upper mantle density models. Our second aim is to estimate the effects on geophysical models, which assume isostatic equilibrium, after correcting the observed gravity field with numerical models for GIA. We show that correcting for GIA in geophysical modelling can give changes of several kilometer in the thickness of structural layers of modeled lithosphere, which is a small but significant correction. Correcting the gravity field for GIA prior to assuming isostatic equilibrium and inferring density anomalies might be relevant in other areas with ongoing postglacial rebound such as North America and the polar regions.

GRACE gravity observations constrain Weichselian ice thickness in the Barents Sea

The Barents Sea is subject to ongoing postglacial uplift since the melting of the Weichselian ice sheet that covered it. The regional ice sheet thickness history is not well known because there is only data at the periphery due to the locations of Franz Joseph Land, Svalbard, and Novaya Zemlya surrounding this paleo ice sheet. We show that the linear trend in the gravity rate derived from a decade of observations from the Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment (GRACE) satellite mission can constrain the volume of the ice sheet after correcting for current ice melt, hydrology, and far-field gravitational effects. Regional ice-loading models based on new geologically inferred ice margin chronologies show a significantly better fit to the GRACE data than that of ICE-5G. The regional ice models contain less ice in the Barents Sea than present in ICE-5G (5–6.3 m equivalent sea level versus 8.5 m), which increases the ongoing difficulty in closing the global sea level budget at the Last Glacial Maximum.

A numerical method for reorientation of rotating tidally deformed viscoelastic bodies

Existing approaches for simulating the true polar wander (TPW) of a visco-elastic body can be divided into three categories: (i) a linear dynamic approach which uses the linearized Liouville equation (e.g. Wu and Peltier [1984]; Mitrovica et al. [2005]); (ii) a non-linear dynamic approach which is based on the quasi-fluid approximation (e.g. Sabadini and Peltier [1981]; Ricard et al. [1993]; Cambiotti et al. [2011]); (iii) a long-term limit approach which only considers the fluid limit of a reorientation (e.g. Matsuyama and Nimmo [2007]). Several limitations of these approaches have not been studied: the range for which the linear approach is accurate, the validity of the quasi-fluid approximation, and the dynamic solution for TPW of a tidally deformed rotating body. We establish a numerical procedure which is able to determine the large angle reorientation of a visco-elastic celestial body that can be both centrifugally and tidally deformed. We show that the linear approach leads to significant errors for loadings near the poles or the equator. Secondly, we show that slow relaxation modes can have a significant effect on large angle TPW of Earth or other planets. Finally, we show that reorientation of a tidally deformed body driven by a positive mass anomaly near the poles has a preference for rotating around the tidal axis instead of towards it. At a tidally deformed body which does not have a remnant bulge, positive mass anomalies are more likely to be found near the equator and the plane perpendicular to the tidal axis, while negative mass anomalies tend to be near the great circle with longitudes 0 and 180 degree.

A Full-Maxwell Approach for Large-Angle Polar Wander of Viscoelastic Bodies: A FULL-MAXWELL APPROACH FOR TPW

For large-angle long-term true polar wander (TPW) there are currently two types of nonlinear methods which give approximated solutions: those assuming that the rotational axis coincides with the axis of maximum moment of inertia (MoI), which simplifies the Liouville equation, and those based on the quasi-fluid approximation, which approximates the Love number. Recent studies show that both can have a significant bias for certain models. Therefore, we still lack an (semi)analytical method which can give exact solutions for large-angle TPW for a model based on Maxwell rheology. This paper provides a method which analytically solves the MoI equation and adopts an extended iterative procedure introduced in Hu et al. (2017) to obtain a time-dependent solution. The new method can be used to simulate the effect of a remnant bulge or models in different hydrostatic states. We show the effect of the viscosity of the lithosphere on long-term, large-angle TPW. We also simulate models without hydrostatic equilibrium and show that the choice of the initial stress-free shape for the elastic (or highly viscous) lithosphere of a given model is as important as its thickness for obtaining a correct TPW behavior. The initial shape of the lithosphere can be an alternative explanation to mantle convection for the difference between the observed and model predicted flattening. Finally, it is concluded that based on the quasi-fluid approximation, TPW speed on Earth and Mars is underestimated, while the speed of the rotational axis approaching the end position on Venus is overestimated.