Global Gravity-based Groundwater Product (G3P)
Groundwater is one of the most important resources for mankind and for ecosystems. Assessing groundwater resources and developing sustainable water management plans based on this resource is a major field of activity for science, water authorities and consultancies worldwide. Due to its fundamental role in the Earth's water and energy cycles, groundwater has been declared as an Essential Climate Variable (ECV) by GCOS, the Global Climate Observing System. The Copernicus Services, however, do not yet deliver data on this fundamental resource, nor is there any other data source worldwide that operationally provides information on changing groundwater resources in a consistant way, observation-based, and with global coverage. This gap will be closed by G3P, the Global Gravity-based Groundwater Product. The G3P consortium combines key expertise from science and industry across Europe that optimally allows to capitalize on the unique capability of GRACE and GRACE-FO satellite gravimetry as the only remote sensing technology to monitor subsurface mass variations and thus groundwater storage change for large areas. G3P is a novel and cross-cutting extension of the Copernicus portfolio towards essential information on the changing state of water resources at European and global scales.
Funding:
- European Commission (Horizon 2020 Research and Innovation Framework Programme)
Project duration:
- January 2020 – December 2022
Partners:
- GFZ Helmholtz Centre Potsdam (DE)
- University of Bern (CH)
- Graz University of Technology (AT)
- Finnish Meteorological Institute (FI)
- Collecte Localisation Satellites (FR)
- IGRAC (NL)
- University of Zürich (CH)
- Magellium (FR)
- University of Toulouse (FR)
- FUTUREWATER (ES, NL)
- Earth Observation Data Centre (AT)
CLIMERS role:
- Development of a gap-filled soil moisture product from C3S data
- Development of a root-zone soil moisture product
- Validation of soil moisture products
CLIMERS staff involved:
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