Reconstruction of climate-driven global terrestrial water storage variations (2002–2021) using a four-parameter linear recursive model

Xie, Pu; Yi, Shuang

doi:10.5194/hess-30-3221-2026

Articles | Volume 30, issue 10

https://doi.org/10.5194/hess-30-3221-2026

© Author(s) 2026. This work is distributed under
the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.

https://doi.org/10.5194/hess-30-3221-2026

© Author(s) 2026. This work is distributed under
the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.

Articles | Volume 30, issue 10

Research article

|

26 May 2026

Research article |

| 26 May 2026

Reconstruction of climate-driven global terrestrial water storage variations (2002–2021) using a four-parameter linear recursive model

Pu Xie and Shuang Yi

Supplement

https://doi.org/10.5194/hess-30-3221-2026-supplement

Data sets

GRACE-REC: A reconstruction of climate-driven water storage changes over the last century V. Humphrey and L. Gudmundsson https://doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.7670849

Global Aridity Index and Potential Evapotranspiration (ET0) Database: Version 3.1 R. Zomer and A. Trabucco https://doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.7504448

ERA5-Land hourly data from 1950 to present Copernicus Climate Change Service (C3S) https://doi.org/10.24381/cds.e2161bac

Short summary

We present a global 0.5° × 0.5° daily reconstruction of terrestrial water storage anomalies from 2002–2021, using a novel four-parameter linear recursive model driven only by precipitation and temperature. The model exhibits strong physical interpretability, efficiently quantifies the precipitation-to-storage conversion fraction, and achieves faster parameter convergence. It outperforms existing models in 89 % of basins, with Nash–Sutcliffe efficiency values exceeding 0.7 in 84 basins.