Temporal and spatial changes of terrestrial water storage in Yellow River Basin based on GRACE

The Yellow River Basin is currently the main gathering place both for economically recoverable coal and coal production in China. Understanding the water sources and its changes is not only a prerequisite for promoting the intensive use of water in the Yellow River Basin, but also the basis for carrying out the ecological protection and sustainable development of the mining areas in the Yellow River Basin. Compared with traditional methods for monitoring terrestrial water storage that are limited by the distribution and number of monitoring points, GRACE provides a new way to study the temporal and spatial changes of water storage anomalies for medium and long-scale regions. The GRACE satellite data are used to conduct the research on temporal and spatial changes of water storage anomalies in Yellow River Basin from April 2002 to June 2017. The weighted average of the length of latitude circles is used to calculate the average change of water storage anomalies, the boxplot is adopted to analyze the monthly average change of the water storage anomalies, and the time series decomposition method is utilized to analyze the characteristics of the trend, annual cycle and semiannual cycle of water storage changes in the studied area. The results show that the decreasing trend of water storage anomalies becomes increasingly obvious in the Yellow River from west to east, and the area near the source has a weak increasing trend. There are obvious regional differences in the annual and semi–annual amplitudes of water storage anomalies, which are closely related to the seasonal differences in alpine snowmelt, precipitation, and the regional climate environment. Understanding the temporal and spatial changes of the water storage in the Yellow River Basin can provide basic data and reference for the ecological protection and sustainable development of the mining areas in the basin.