Using GRACE to Detect Groundwater Variation in North China Plain after South–North Water Diversion

Abstract The gravity recovery and climate experiment (GRACE) and its Follow‐On mission provide a versatile tool for monitoring groundwater depletion in North China Plain (NCP). However, intermittent data gaps and inherent coarse spatial resolution have restricted the continuous detection of regional groundwater storage anomaly (GWSA) after 2014, the period of interest during the implementation of the south‐to‐north water diversion middle route project (SNWDP). Here, we investigated the spatiotemporal changes of GWSA in the NCP during 2004 to 2020 based on continuous downscaled GRACE data. First, we derived the continuous terrestrial water storage anomaly from six GRACE and Follow‐On solutions (i.e., spherical harmonics (SH) and mass concentration [mascon] solutions). Second, we employed a long short‐term memory (LSTM) model and water balance equation to downscale GWSA (i.e., 0.25° × 0.25°). Lastly, we investigated its spatiotemporal characteristics before (2004 to 2014) and after (2015 to 2020) the SNWDP operation. We show the applicability of the continuous downscaled GWSA to capture the characteristics of in situ measurements. The GWSA detects groundwater depletion at a significant ( p < 0.05) rate of −17.09 ± 1.80 (SH) and −17.87 ± 1.65 (mascon) mm/a during 2004 to 2014, but a recovering trend of 7.18 ± 3.98 (SH) and 8.23 ± 4.99 (mascon) during 2015 to 2018. The subsequent groundwater extraction and precipitation reduction from 2019 to 2020, resulted in the decreasing trend of GWSA from 2015 to 2020, which is −19.11 ± 8.75 (SH) and −19.72 ± 9.08 mm/a (mascon), respectively. Spatially, the overall depletion trends become nonsignificant along the canals of SNWDP compared to the period 2004 to 2014, and groundwater recovering with trends <6 mm/a near Beijing and Tianjin are detected by the mascon solution during 2015 to 2020.