Trends and Interannual Variability in Terrestrial Water Storage Over the Eastern United States, 2003–2016

We examine the relative contributions of root zone soil moisture (SM) and groundwater (GW) storage to trends and interannual variability in total water storage (TWS) from essentially the entire Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment (GRACE) record (2003–2016). Our study region is the Eastern United States where GW generally is shallow, and we use observations and simulations from a suite of land surface models (LSMs) where observations are not available. We first consider Illinois, which has a long‐term network of SM sensors and observation wells. We assessed the uncertainties in GRACE TWS in comparison with the observation‐based TWS using observed SM, well‐derived GW, and model‐reconstructed snow water equivalent. We evaluated LSM SM compared with observations over Illinois; generally good agreement encouraged us to use the LSM‐ensemble average SM, well‐derived GW, and Snow Data Assimilation System snow water equivalent over the entire Eastern United States to examine the relative contribution of storage components to GRACE TWS over this larger domain. Taken together, the three components explained 2%–85% of interannual variability in GRACE TWS across the 2‐digit Hydrologic Unit Code regions. Root zone SM was the dominant contributor to the interannual variability (but not trends) of GRACE TWS over much of the Eastern United States. We also compared three independent approaches to estimating GW: well data, baseflow observations, and GRACE. Despite much smaller magnitudes of variation, baseflow‐derived GW correlated more highly with well‐derived GW over the eastern‐most and Upper Mississippi regions, while GRACE‐derived GW matched better with well‐derived GW over the remaining regions. Key Points Over the Eastern United States, soil moisture accounts for most of the interannual variability (but not trends) of terrestrial water storage Models that do not represent groundwater underestimate interannual variations in terrestrial water storage by about one third