GROUNDWATER MONITORING USING GRACE MISSION

Abstract. Since last few decades, India has met to major crises related to groundwater. Major cities, for example, Delhi, Chennai, Bengaluru etc. are facing extreme risk of water crisis. In next few decades, this may lead to a major water crisis when this non-renewable resource is exhausted. Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment (GRACE) mission, widely used for monitoring of groundwater storage change, could be utilized to get the information of exact amount of water above or below the surface of the earth that may be used to counter act over such situation of water crisis. GRACE mission consists of two earth orbiting satellite vehicles (SVs) separated by 220 km with the objective of computing change in gravity by increasing or decreasing distance between both the SVs caused by higher or lower gravity masses. The primary objective of the presented work is to obtain the liquid water equivalent height in a selected area using GRACE mission data with GLDAS soil moisture data. The advantage of using GRACE is that it provides better accuracy (fraction of 1cm) in comparison to traditional methods, therefore, larger extent could be covered. This paper extensively discusses about GRACE application (especially groundwater monitoring), challenges with GRACE missions and about effective methods for groundwater recharge.