Variability of Equivalent Water Height (EWH) in Indonesia during 14 years of grace gravity satellite mission

Abstract

GRACE Satellite (Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment) is a gravity monitoring satellite, that is very sensitive to mass changes, especially the signals that produce by redistribution of water masses. Data from this satellite can be used to observe water distribution in the form of spherical harmonic coefficients. Water mass variations are presented as Equivalent Water Height (EWH). The results of GRACE processing showed that the largest EWH was 27.298 cm in January 2015 and the smallest EWH was 29.816 cm in June 2004 in Sumatera Island. The positive trend occurred in Sumatra island and the negative trend occurred in eastern Indonesia. Generally, the trend of Indonesian rainfall throughout 2002 to 2016 was constant. However, there was a change in seasonal patterns in 2014. This research also use Mascon data from GRACE satellite to determine the radius of the gaussian filter and TRMM satellite’s data to observe rainfall data to be compared with the EWH variability from GRACE.

Keywords

• GRACE
• Equivalent Water Height (EWH)
• TRMM
• trend
• spherical harmonic
• MASCON