GRACE products and land surface models for estimating the changes in key water storage components in the Nile River Basin

Abstract The Nile River Basin (NRB) is facing extreme demand for its water resources due to an alarming increase in population and the changing climate. NRB not compatible with ground-based in-situ observations owing large basin area size limited hydrological data access from countries. Thus, it lends itself remotely sensed approaches high spatial resolution extended temporal coverage. Gravity Recovery Climate Experiment (GRACE) avails a unique opportunity investigate changes key components of terrestrial storage (TWS). GRACE TWS solutions have specific tuning parameters processing strategies that result regionally variations error patterns. We explored time series spatiotemporal changes, trends, uncertainties, signal-to-noise ratio among different data. had also investigated such as surface water, soil moisture, groundwater changes. results show spherical harmonic solutions' uncertainty higher than mass concentration (mascon) over NRB, Center Space Research-mascons best performance. evapotranspiration correlation (R2 = 0.85) has highest GRACE’s TWS, whereas normalized difference vegetation index (R2 = 0.82) second correlation. Notably, significant long-term (2003–2017) negative moisture trends demonstrate potential depletion NRB. Despite precipitation series, rate decline increased rapidly after 2008, thereby indicating possibility human-induced change (e.g. irrigation purposes). Therefore, this study provide guide future studies related hydro-climatic similar basins.