Terrestrial Water Storage retrieval from GRACE level 2 products

Authors: Kiana Karimi, Iniobong Benson, Roelof Rietbroek Jan 2025

Preparation on the crib platform

To run the tutorials you need the shxarray software. We've prepared an installation in a so called Python virtual environment (pysh_aarch64,..).

In order to make this virtual environment available for you when creating notebooks, you still need to do some steps

Clone the repository

1. From the Jupyter interface open a terminal File-> New -> Terminal

2. Clone the repository from git

git clone https://github.com/ITC-Water-Resources/M-GEO_TWS-GRACE-Exercise

3. In the terminal window, navigate to the shared course folder

cd /data/shared/Hydrological-and-Environmental-Cycles-2024-1B/Roelof_TWS/TerrestrialWaterStorage

4. Install the Python virtual environments so they are available to your Jupyter notebooks

~/M-GEO_TWS-GRACE-Exercise/setup_pipenv.sh

Start the Tutorial

Now, using the folder navigation in the left of your Jupyter window, navigate to the cloned repository and open the first tutorial:

1. Navivate to your cloned repository

M-GEO_TWS-GRACE-Exercise/ 

2. Open the Jupyter Notebook interface and double-click on Tutorial_1_nocode.ipynb

Congratulations! You're ready to begin.

If you encounter any issue with any of the step please ask one of the instructors

Data Access

The datasets required for this tutorial are already provided. Below is a guide to their locations and structure.

GRACE Spherical Harmonics Data

The monthly GRACE spherical harmonic solutions are stored in the shared directory:

/data/shared/Hydrological-and-Environmental-Cycles-2024-1B/Roelof_TWS/data

The folder structure includes:

• monthly_solutions: Monthly GRACE solutions.

• monthly_background: Background model files.

• monthly_n96: Processed GRACE solutions.

• static: Supporting static gravity files.

These datasets are critical for analyzing terrestrial water storage.

Basin Data

The basin data files (e.g., AMAZONAS.gpkg, GREENLAND.gpkg) are already included in the cloned repository under:

M-GEO_TWS-GRACE-Exercise/data/basins

The folder folder structure for this tutorial is

M-GEO_TWS-GRACE-Exercise
│   └───data 
│    └───basins # Basin data files
│       │  AMAZONAS.gpkg
│       │   ...
│       │  GREENLAND.gpkg
│       │   ...
│   README.md # Setup and tutorial instructions
│   requirements.txt # Python dependencies
│   setup.pipenv.sh # Script for setting up pipenv (optional)
│   Tutorial_1_nocode.ipynb # First tutorial (no code version)
│   Tutorial_1.ipynb # First tutorial (with code)
│   Tutorial_2.ipynb  # Second tutorial