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Assessment of Reliability, Resilience, and Vulnerability (RRV) of terrestrial water storage using Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment (GRACE) for Indian river basins
Journal
Remote Sensing Applications: Society and Environment
Date Issued
2022-11-01
Author(s)
Bhere, Sachin
Reddy, Manne Janga
Abstract
Understanding the changes in water storage of a certain region is crucial for planning and managing water resources since it is inevitable due to climate change and anthropogenic activities. Sustainability analysis using Reliability, Resilience, and Vulnerability (RRV) approch give an idea about the exploitation of the water resources, steps taken to restore the water storage, and how sustainable the overall water resources are with changing climate and anthropogenic influence. To determine the sustainability of water resources in a region, extensive data of different hydrological variables above, below, and on the earth's surface are required. But, the data for those hydrological variables are difficult to get and not available at all sites. The Terrestrial water storgae (TWS) data of Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment (GRACE) has some benefits in this regard, as it provides a column integrated data representing groundwater, soil moisture, surface runoff, and snowmelt. This study presented the sustainability analysis of the TWS using the Reliability-Resiliency-Vulnerability (RRV) assessment over the Indian River basins. The GRACE-based index is presented to define the deficit (or excess) of the TWS over an area. The RRV assessment helps to find the frequency of satisfactory water storage (reliability), the capacity to recover from the water storage deficit (resilience), and the magnitude of the extreme deficit (vulnerability) of TWS. The spatial distribution of sustainability is analyzed by combining the Reliability, Resiliency, and Vulnerability of TWS. The results of the GRACE's TWS-based sustainability analysis are validated with the individual hydrological variables of the Global Land Data Assimilation System (GLDAS) and in-situ groundwater observations. The study demonstrated the applicability of the GRACE's TWS data for analyzing the sustainability of water resources across different River basins in India, and found that there is a decreasing trend of groundwater storage in Punjab and Haryana, an increasing trend of snowmelt in the Himalayas, and decreasing trend of surface runoff in the Southern peninsular, which indicates the overall water availability across the country is decreasing.
Volume
28
Subjects