Hydrogeological control of groundwater variations in the Congo River Basin revealed by GRACE water storage change decomposition

1. Summary The Congo basin’s Groundwater Storage Anomaly (GWSA) datasets are generated by Benjamin M. Kitambo, Sly Wongchuig, Raphael M. Tshimanga, Adrien Paris, Alejandro Blazquez, Daniel Moreira, Frederic Frappart, Ayan Santos Fleischmann, Jean-Marie O. Kileshye , Mohammad J. Tourian, Fabrice Papa in the article entitled "Hydrogeological control of groundwater variations in the Congo River Basin revealed by GRACE water storage change decomposition", Water Resources Research (submitted). The dataset was generated using the decomposition method of Terrestrial Water Storage Anomaly (TWSA) which is the sum of the contributions of different hydrological storage compartments including changes in surface water storage anomaly (ΔSWSA), root zone soil moisture (ΔSMroot), snow storage (ΔSnow), and GWSA (ΔGWSA) (Frappart and Ramillien, 2018). The equation is as follows: ΔTWSA = ΔSWSA + ΔSMroot + ΔSnow + ΔGWSA (1) ΔGWSA changes are obtained by subtracting ΔSWSA, ΔSMroot, ΔSnow from ΔTWSA on the same period of availability for all datasets, here 2002-2015. Since there is no contribution of snow storage in the Congo tropical region, this term is neglected in our study. Only GWSA datasets are provided from different Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment (GRACE) solutions including Jet Propulsion Laboratory spherical harmonics (JPL-SH), JPL mass concentration blocks mascons (JPL-M), GeoforschungsZentrum Potsdam SH (GFZ-SH), CSR mascons (CSR-M), CNES-L3. To get ΔTWSA ,ΔSWSA, ΔSMroot datasets, please kindly refer to the aforementioned paper where all links are provided. 2. Name Description ● Month_data_XX: Months of availability of GWSA data due to the missing values in GRACE’s TWSA XX (where XX stands for CNES-L3, Others which include JPL-SH, JPL-M, GFZ-SH, CSR-M). ● GWSA_XX: monthly groundwater storage anomaly variations from XX (where XX stands for JPL-SH, JPL-M, GFZ-SH, CSR-M, and CNES-L3 GRACE solutions). 3. File Description The GWSA estimates from the decomposition method of TWSA provides the monthly variation of groundwater storage changes over 2002-2015, gridded on 0.25-degree of spatial resolution, each pixel covering almost 773 km². The files are organized in matrix: ● First column represents the latitude in degree. ● Second column represents the longitude in degree. ● From the third column: GWSA data in km³, there are 139 (respectively 147) columns representing each month of data availability of the period from 2002 to 2015 from CNES-L3 GRACE solution (respectively JPL-SH, JPL-M, GFZ-SH, CSR-M GRACE solutions).