Will the MAGIC mission improve the observability of extreme hydrological events?

NASA and DLR will launch in 2028 GRACE-C (Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment – Continuation). This mission will again be launched into a polar orbit at 500 km initial altitude and extend the observation of the time-variable Earth’s gravity field from GRACE (2002-2017) and GRACE-FO (GRACE Follow-On, 2018-today). ESA plans to launch a Next Generation Gravity Mission (NGGM) in 2032, which shall fly in a lower and inclined orbit and be based on improved instrumentation. GRACE-C and NGGM will then form the double-pair Mass-Change and Geosciences International Constellation (MAGIC) to significantly increase the spatial and temporal resolution of mass transport products and deduce water mass redistribution over the oceans, ice sheets and continents.

Thanks to the 20+ years period of GRACE and GRACE-FO observations, scientists are able to analyse extreme hydrological events, such as flooding and droughts. However, due to the rather coarse spatial resolution of the GRACE and GRACE-FO data sets of approximately 350 km, finer spatial details of such extreme events are kept hidden. Further, spatial leakage limits the value of these data for smaller-scale regional investigations.

In this contribution, we will employ five years of simulated data for both a single polar pair (GRACE-FO-like) and a MAGIC baseline scenario. Thanks to the simulation, we can also assess the true values of the hydrological input models. Both simulated data sets are filtered with the same DDK filters for comparison. The filter strength can be reduced for the MAGIC baseline scenario without introducing more striping errors.

With these simulated data sets, we investigate extreme hydrological events. For example, the localisation of extreme wet events along the northern coast of Australia is much improved, with less signal leakage into the surrounding ocean.