GRACEDADM_CLSM0125US_7D: U.S. Groundwater and Soil Moisture Drought Indicators

GRACE-DA-DM U.S. V4.0 data product from NASA Goddard Space Flight Center provides weekly drought indicators for groundwater and soil moisture. Indicators are derived from GRACE and GRACE-FO satellite data assimilation into a land surface model, with a spatial resolution of 0.125 x 0.125 degrees over North America. The dataset supersedes previous versions and contains daily percentile data available each Monday, based on a record from 1948 to 2014.

Use Cases

• Monitor drought severity and progression based on groundwater, root zone, and surface soil moisture percentiles.
• Validate and calibrate hydrological models using assimilated satellite-derived terrestrial water storage data.
• Assess agricultural drought risk and water stress for crops based on root zone soil moisture conditions.
• Analyze long-term trends in water storage anomalies for climate change impact studies.

Strengths

• Spatial resolution of 0.125 x 0.125 degrees provides detailed geographic coverage.
• Integrates GRACE (2002-2017) and GRACE-FO (2018-present) satellite data for a continuous time series.
• Uses a 7-day moving average climatology for percentile computation to improve temporal transition of drought conditions.
• Model parameters were updated to resolve a known dry limit issue, improving accuracy near Zapata, Texas.

Limitations

• Data is available only one day (Monday) per week, despite being daily indicators.
• Column-level documentation is absent; field semantics must be inferred after download.
• Row count and total file size are unknown, which may limit suitability assessment.

Provenance

Source

National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA Goddard Space Flight Center)

Collection Method

Data assimilation of GRACE and GRACE-FO satellite observations into the Catchment Land Surface Model (CLSM) within the Land Information System framework.

Time Range

April 2002 to present, with a baseline period of 2003-2019 for anomaly computation.

Freshness

Last updated 2026-03-13 01:47:37.745959; freshness should be verified.

Geography

North America, specifically the United States.