Estimates of water mass variations from GRACE data in the Paraguay River Basin

AYELEN PEREIRA; CECILIA CORNERO; MARÍA CRISTINA PACINO; LETICIA M. BURGUÉS

Venecia

Simposio; Simposio Internacional Gravedad, Geoide y Sistemas de Alturas GGHS; 2012

International Association of Geodesy (IAG)

Aquatic environments, like a river basin, perform important functions in nature such as control of climate, floods and nutrients; and they also provide goods and services for humanity. To monitor these environments at large spatial scales, the satellite gravity mission GRACE provides time-variable gravity field models that reflect the Earth´s gravity field variations due to mass transport processes, like continental water storage changes. GRACE can map these changes to heights of a few millimeters on a spatial resolution of 300 km. The Paraguay River basin constitutes one of the main sub-basins of the La Plata river hydrographic system. This basin has a total extension of 1.095.000 km2 and includes part of Brazil, Paraguay, Argentina and Bolivia. It extends almost entirely by a vast alluvial plain of a slight slope and wide floodplains. The Pantanal is part of the Upper Paraguay River basin and is one of the most immense and biologically rich environments on the planet. The purpose of this work is to analyze the spatial and temporal water storage changes in the Paraguay River Basin using the Equivalent Water Height (EWH) derived from the GRACE solutions provided by the GRGS center. Annual and semi-annual EWH maps for the period when the major changes occurred (2007-2011) were made. Preliminary results of the correlation between the EWH and river gauge measurements in The Pantanal are also presented.