Tracking the weight of Hurricane Harvey’s stormwater using GPS data
Abstract
On 26 August 2017, Hurricane Harvey struck the Gulf Coast as a category four cyclone depositing ~95 km3 of water, making it the wettest cyclone in U.S. history. Water left in Harvey’s wake should cause elastic loading and subsidence of Earth’s crust, and uplift as it drains into the ocean and evaporates. To track daily changes of transient water storage, we use Global Positioning System (GPS) measurements, finding a clear migration of subsidence (up to 21 mm) and horizontal motion (up to 4 mm) across the Gulf Coast, followed by gradual uplift over a 5-week period. Inversion of these data shows that a third of Harvey’s total stormwater was captured on land (25.7 ± 3.0 km3), indicating that the rest drained rapidly into the ocean at a rate of 8.2 km3/day, with the remaining stored water gradually lost over the following 5 weeks at ~1 km3/day, primarily by evapotranspiration. These results indicate that GPS networks can remotely track the spatial extent and daily evolution of terrestrial water storage following transient, extreme precipitation events, with implications for improving operational flood forecasts and understanding the response of drainage systems to large influxes of water.
- Authors:
-
- California Inst. of Technology (CalTech), Pasadena, CA (United States). Jet Propulsion Lab.
- Univ. of California, Berkeley, CA (United States). Department of Earth and Planetary Science
- Bowling Green State University, Bowling Green, OH (United States). School of Earth, Environment and Society
- Publication Date:
- Research Org.:
- Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL), Berkeley, CA (United States)
- Sponsoring Org.:
- USDOE Office of Science (SC)
- OSTI Identifier:
- 1479445
- Grant/Contract Number:
- AC02-05CH11231
- Resource Type:
- Accepted Manuscript
- Journal Name:
- Science Advances
- Additional Journal Information:
- Journal Volume: 4; Journal Issue: 9; Journal ID: ISSN 2375-2548
- Publisher:
- AAAS
- Country of Publication:
- United States
- Language:
- English
- Subject:
- 54 ENVIRONMENTAL SCIENCES
Citation Formats
Milliner, Chris, Materna, Kathryn, Bürgmann, Roland, Fu, Yuning, Moore, Angelyn W., Bekaert, David, Adhikari, Surendra, and Argus, Donald F. Tracking the weight of Hurricane Harvey’s stormwater using GPS data. United States: N. p., 2018.
Web. doi:10.1126/sciadv.aau2477.
Milliner, Chris, Materna, Kathryn, Bürgmann, Roland, Fu, Yuning, Moore, Angelyn W., Bekaert, David, Adhikari, Surendra, & Argus, Donald F. Tracking the weight of Hurricane Harvey’s stormwater using GPS data. United States. https://doi.org/10.1126/sciadv.aau2477
Milliner, Chris, Materna, Kathryn, Bürgmann, Roland, Fu, Yuning, Moore, Angelyn W., Bekaert, David, Adhikari, Surendra, and Argus, Donald F. Wed .
"Tracking the weight of Hurricane Harvey’s stormwater using GPS data". United States. https://doi.org/10.1126/sciadv.aau2477. https://www.osti.gov/servlets/purl/1479445.
@article{osti_1479445,
title = {Tracking the weight of Hurricane Harvey’s stormwater using GPS data},
author = {Milliner, Chris and Materna, Kathryn and Bürgmann, Roland and Fu, Yuning and Moore, Angelyn W. and Bekaert, David and Adhikari, Surendra and Argus, Donald F.},
abstractNote = {On 26 August 2017, Hurricane Harvey struck the Gulf Coast as a category four cyclone depositing ~95 km3 of water, making it the wettest cyclone in U.S. history. Water left in Harvey’s wake should cause elastic loading and subsidence of Earth’s crust, and uplift as it drains into the ocean and evaporates. To track daily changes of transient water storage, we use Global Positioning System (GPS) measurements, finding a clear migration of subsidence (up to 21 mm) and horizontal motion (up to 4 mm) across the Gulf Coast, followed by gradual uplift over a 5-week period. Inversion of these data shows that a third of Harvey’s total stormwater was captured on land (25.7 ± 3.0 km3), indicating that the rest drained rapidly into the ocean at a rate of 8.2 km3/day, with the remaining stored water gradually lost over the following 5 weeks at ~1 km3/day, primarily by evapotranspiration. These results indicate that GPS networks can remotely track the spatial extent and daily evolution of terrestrial water storage following transient, extreme precipitation events, with implications for improving operational flood forecasts and understanding the response of drainage systems to large influxes of water.},
doi = {10.1126/sciadv.aau2477},
journal = {Science Advances},
number = 9,
volume = 4,
place = {United States},
year = {Wed Sep 19 00:00:00 EDT 2018},
month = {Wed Sep 19 00:00:00 EDT 2018}
}
Web of Science
Works referenced in this record:
How to construct recursive digital filters for baseflow separation
journal, January 2005
- Eckhardt, K.
- Hydrological Processes, Vol. 19, Issue 2
Modelling the global ocean tides: modern insights from FES2004
journal, September 2006
- Lyard, Florent; Lefevre, Fabien; Letellier, Thierry
- Ocean Dynamics, Vol. 56, Issue 5-6
Water in the Balance
journal, June 2013
- Famiglietti, J. S.; Rodell, M.
- Science, Vol. 340, Issue 6138
Storm Runoff Generation in Humid Headwater Catchments: 1. Where Does the Water Come From?
journal, August 1986
- Pearce, A. J.; Stewart, M. K.; Sklash, M. G.
- Water Resources Research, Vol. 22, Issue 8
Vertical GPS ground motion rates in the Euro-Mediterranean region: New evidence of velocity gradients at different spatial scales along the Nubia-Eurasia plate boundary: GPS VERTICAL DEFORMATION IN EUROPE
journal, November 2013
- Serpelloni, Enrico; Faccenna, Claudio; Spada, Giorgio
- Journal of Geophysical Research: Solid Earth, Vol. 118, Issue 11
Spatiotemporal filtering for regional GPS network in China using independent component analysis
journal, November 2016
- Ming, Feng; Yang, Yuanxi; Zeng, Anmin
- Journal of Geodesy, Vol. 91, Issue 4
Flood Forecasting and Inundation Mapping Using HiResFlood-UCI and Near-Real-Time Satellite Precipitation Data: The 2008 Iowa Flood
journal, June 2015
- Nguyen, Phu; Thorstensen, Andrea; Sorooshian, Soroosh
- Journal of Hydrometeorology, Vol. 16, Issue 3
Sustained Water Loss in California's Mountain Ranges During Severe Drought From 2012 to 2015 Inferred From GPS: Sustained water changes in California
journal, December 2017
- Argus, Donald F.; Landerer, Felix W.; Wiese, David N.
- Journal of Geophysical Research: Solid Earth, Vol. 122, Issue 12
Numerical simulations of global-scale high-resolution hydrological crustal deformations: HIGH-RESOLUTION HYDROLOGICAL LOADING
journal, September 2013
- Dill, R.; Dobslaw, H.
- Journal of Geophysical Research: Solid Earth, Vol. 118, Issue 9
Sampling Errors in the Estimation of Empirical Orthogonal Functions
journal, July 1982
- North, Gerald R.; Bell, Thomas L.; Cahalan, Robert F.
- Monthly Weather Review, Vol. 110, Issue 7
Reproducing an extreme flood with uncertain post-event information
journal, January 2017
- Fuentes-Andino, Diana; Beven, Keith; Halldin, Sven
- Hydrology and Earth System Sciences, Vol. 21, Issue 7
Improving runoff prediction through the assimilation of the ASCAT soil moisture product
journal, January 2010
- Brocca, L.; Melone, F.; Moramarco, T.
- Hydrology and Earth System Sciences, Vol. 14, Issue 10
Seasonal and long-term vertical deformation in the Nepal Himalaya constrained by GPS and GRACE measurements: GPS/GRACE VERTICAL DEFORMATION IN NEPAL
journal, March 2012
- Fu, Yuning; Freymueller, Jeffrey T.
- Journal of Geophysical Research: Solid Earth, Vol. 117, Issue B3
Global estimates of the land–atmosphere water flux based on monthly AVHRR and ISLSCP-II data, validated at 16 FLUXNET sites
journal, March 2008
- Fisher, Joshua B.; Tu, Kevin P.; Baldocchi, Dennis D.
- Remote Sensing of Environment, Vol. 112, Issue 3
Uncertainty in river discharge observations: a quantitative analysis
journal, January 2009
- Di Baldassarre, G.; Montanari, A.
- Hydrology and Earth System Sciences, Vol. 13, Issue 6
GPS as an independent measurement to estimate terrestrial water storage variations in Washington and Oregon: GPS Water Storage: Washington and Oregon
journal, January 2015
- Fu, Yuning; Argus, Donald F.; Landerer, Felix W.
- Journal of Geophysical Research: Solid Earth, Vol. 120, Issue 1
River basin flood potential inferred using GRACE gravity observations at several months lead time
journal, July 2014
- Reager, J. T.; Thomas, B. F.; Famiglietti, J. S.
- Nature Geoscience, Vol. 7, Issue 8
Precise point positioning for the efficient and robust analysis of GPS data from large networks
journal, March 1997
- Zumberge, J. F.; Heflin, M. B.; Jefferson, D. C.
- Journal of Geophysical Research: Solid Earth, Vol. 102, Issue B3
A real-time hydrological model for flood prediction using GIS and the WWW
journal, January 2003
- Al-Sabhan, W.; Mulligan, M.; Blackburn, G. A.
- Computers, Environment and Urban Systems, Vol. 27, Issue 1
ISSM-SESAW v1.0: mesh-based computation of gravitationally consistent sea-level and geodetic signatures caused by cryosphere and climate driven mass change
journal, January 2016
- Adhikari, Surendra; Ivins, Erik R.; Larour, Eric
- Geoscientific Model Development, Vol. 9, Issue 3
SMOS soil moisture assimilation for improved hydrologic simulation in the Murray Darling Basin, Australia
journal, October 2015
- Lievens, H.; Tomer, S. K.; Al Bitar, A.
- Remote Sensing of Environment, Vol. 168
The multi-institution North American Land Data Assimilation System (NLDAS): Utilizing multiple GCIP products and partners in a continental distributed hydrological modeling system
journal, January 2004
- Mitchell, Kenneth E.
- Journal of Geophysical Research, Vol. 109, Issue D7
Deformation of the Earth by surface loads
journal, January 1972
- Farrell, W. E.
- Reviews of Geophysics, Vol. 10, Issue 3
Implementation and testing of the gridded Vienna Mapping Function 1 (VMF1)
journal, June 2007
- Kouba, J.
- Journal of Geodesy, Vol. 82, Issue 4-5
Global terrestrial water storage capacity and flood potential using GRACE
journal, January 2009
- Reager, J. T.; Famiglietti, J. S.
- Geophysical Research Letters, Vol. 36, Issue 23
Spatiotemporal filtering using principal component analysis and Karhunen-Loeve expansion approaches for regional GPS network analysis: SPATIOTEMPORAL FILTERING GPS NETWORK
journal, March 2006
- Dong, D.; Fang, P.; Bock, Y.
- Journal of Geophysical Research: Solid Earth, Vol. 111, Issue B3
Troposphere mapping functions for GPS and very long baseline interferometry from European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts operational analysis data: TROPOSPHERE MAPPING FUNCTIONS FROM ECMWF
journal, February 2006
- Boehm, Johannes; Werl, Birgit; Schuh, Harald
- Journal of Geophysical Research: Solid Earth, Vol. 111, Issue B2
Error analysis of continuous GPS position time series
journal, January 2004
- Williams, Simon D. P.
- Journal of Geophysical Research, Vol. 109, Issue B3
Preliminary reference Earth model
journal, June 1981
- Dziewonski, Adam M.; Anderson, Don L.
- Physics of the Earth and Planetary Interiors, Vol. 25, Issue 4
Independent component analysis: algorithms and applications
journal, June 2000
- Hyvärinen, A.; Oja, E.
- Neural Networks, Vol. 13, Issue 4-5
Attribution of extreme rainfall from Hurricane Harvey, August 2017
journal, December 2017
- van Oldenborgh, Geert Jan; van der Wiel, Karin; Sebastian, Antonia
- Environmental Research Letters, Vol. 12, Issue 12
Southern California permanent GPS geodetic array: Spatial filtering of daily positions for estimating coseismic and postseismic displacements induced by the 1992 Landers earthquake
journal, August 1997
- Wdowinski, Shimon; Bock, Yehuda; Zhang, Jie
- Journal of Geophysical Research: Solid Earth, Vol. 102, Issue B8
Ongoing drought-induced uplift in the western United States
journal, August 2014
- Borsa, A. A.; Agnew, D. C.; Cayan, D. R.
- Science, Vol. 345, Issue 6204
Extracting seasonal deformations of the Nepal Himalaya region from vertical GPS position time series using Independent Component Analysis
journal, December 2017
- Liu, Bin; Dai, Wujiao; Liu, Ning
- Advances in Space Research, Vol. 60, Issue 12
Works referencing / citing this record:
LoadDef: A Python‐Based Toolkit to Model Elastic Deformation Caused by Surface Mass Loading on Spherically Symmetric Bodies
journal, February 2019
- Martens, Hilary R.; Rivera, Luis; Simons, Mark
- Earth and Space Science, Vol. 6, Issue 2
Interpretation of the Tropospheric Gradients Estimated With GPS During Hurricane Harvey
journal, August 2019
- Graffigna, Victoria; Hernández‐Pajares, Manuel; Gende, Mauricio
- Earth and Space Science, Vol. 6, Issue 8
Groundwater Variations From Autocorrelation and Receiver Functions
journal, December 2019
- Kim, D.; Lekic, V.
- Geophysical Research Letters, Vol. 46, Issue 23
Separation of Sources of Seasonal Uplift in China Using Independent Component Analysis of GNSS Time Series
journal, November 2019
- Yan, Jun; Dong, Danan; Bürgmann, Roland
- Journal of Geophysical Research: Solid Earth, Vol. 124, Issue 11
How much water can be captured from flood flows to store in depleted aquifers for mitigating floods and droughts? A case study from Texas, US
journal, May 2019
- Yang, Qian; Scanlon, Bridget R.
- Environmental Research Letters, Vol. 14, Issue 5
LoadDef: A Python‐Based Toolkit to Model Elastic Deformation Caused by Surface Mass Loading on Spherically Symmetric Bodies
journal, February 2019
- Martens, Hilary R.; Rivera, Luis; Simons, Mark
- Earth and Space Science, Vol. 6, Issue 2