Monday 22 August 2005

G3
1600-1700 hours

084
The 2003 European heat wave observed by GRACE
Andersen, Ole B.¹, Seneviratne, Sonia², Hinderer, Jacques³, Viterbo, Pedro⁴
1 Danish National Space Center, Denmark
2 Atmospheric and Climate Science ETH, Zurich, Switzerland
3 Ecole et Observatoire des Sciences de la Terre, Institut de Physique du Globe de Strasbourg, Strasbourg, France
4 European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts, Reading, UK
Author email: oa@spacecenter.dk
The GRACE twin-satellites reveal large inter-annual terrestrial water-storage variations between 2002 and 2003 for Central Europe. GRACE observes a negative trend in regional water storage from 2002 to 2003 peaking at -7.8 cm in central Europe with an accuracy of 1 cm. The 2003 excess terrestrial water storage depletion observed from GRACE observations in comparison with 2002, can be related with the record-breaking heatwave that occurred in Central Europe in 2003. We validate the findings from GRACE using two independent hydrological models and direct gravity observations from superconducting gravimeters in Europe. All datasets agree well with the GRACE measurements despite the disparity of the employed information and the difference between datasets tend to be within GRACE margin of error. The April-to-August terrestrial water storage depletion in 2003 is found to be of the order of 6-8 cm, compared to 2-4 cm in 2002.

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