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. 2018:11:926-932.
doi: 10.1038/s41561-018-0265-7. Epub 2018 Nov 30.

Recent global decline in endorheic basin water storages

Jida Wang #  1 , Chunqiao Song #  2   3 , John T Reager  4 , Fangfang Yao  1 , James S Famiglietti  4   5 , Yongwei Sheng  3 , Glen M MacDonald  3   6 , Fanny Brun  7   8 , Hannes Müller Schmied  9   10 , Richard A Marston  1 , Yoshihide Wada  11
Affiliations

Recent global decline in endorheic basin water storages

Jida Wang et al. Nat Geosci. 2018.
No abstract available

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Conflict of interest statement

Financial and non-financial competing interests The authors declare no competing financial interests.

Figures

Figure 1.
Figure 1.
Terrestrial water storage (TWS) changes within global endorheic and exorheic basins from GRACE observations, April 2002 to March 2016. (a) Trends in individual endorheic units, each comparable to the 3-degree mascon in size (~100k km2). No trends are calculated for sporadic endorheic regions (black) smaller than a mascon. (b) Monthly anomalies in endorheic (black) and exorheic (green) regions. (c) Deseasonalized anomalies (axes as in b). Error bars show 95% confidence intervals (CIs) of monthly anomalies induced by mascon data errors. Shadings illustrate 95% CIs for best-fit linear trends induced by both mascon and rescaling errors (see Methods for uncertainty analysis).
Figure 2.
Figure 2.
Linkage between TWS anomalies and El Niño-Southern Oscillation (ENSO). Left y-axis shows deseasonalized monthly anomalies of global exorheic (green) and endorheic (black) TWS (error bars as in Fig. 1c). Right y-axis shows ENSO intensities in multivariate ENSO index (MEI), (accessed from www.esrl.noaa.gov/psd/enso/mei/table.html). Positive MEI values indicate El Niño and negative values La Niña. Exorheic anomalies are significantly corrected with MEI (Pearson r = −0.50, p < 0.001), with the strongest correlation (–0.60) achieved by lagging MEI one season behind TWS anomalies (shown here). Under the same condition, endorheic anomalies appear less sensitive to ENSO modulations (also see Supplementary Information).
Figure 3.
Figure 3.
Endorheic TWS changes in different geographic zones. (a) Six primary zones defined as basin groups by continental and climatic similarities, where Central Eurasia further highlights four secondary zones, i.e., the Caspian Sea Basin, the Aral Sea Basin, the Inner Tibetan Plateau, and the other regions. (b) Summary of zonal TWS trends (gigatons of water loss per year and mm of equivalent SLR per year). Error bars represent 95% CIs for each TWS trend. (c–h) Monthly series of deseasonalized zonal TWS anomalies (as in Fig. 1; axis labels consistent with h).
Figure 4.
Figure 4.
Endorheic net TWS changes partitioned into contributions of different hydrological storages. (a) As in Fig. 3a. (b) The global total of endorheic storage change and attributions to surface water, soil moisture, and groundwater (gigatons of water loss per year and mm of equivalent SLR per year). (c–l) Zonal net storage changes and different storage contributions (axis labels as in b). Error bars represent 95% CIs. Bar colors for different water storages follow the convention for blue (surface water and groundwater) and green (soil moisture) water resources.
See this image and copyright information in PMC

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