Detection of hydrological effect on local gravity anomalies

Detecting change in water storage from related temporal variation in gravity has become an important issue for many studies and research related to the Earth and environmental science, oceanography and climatology, and in particular hydrology and geophysics. Find-ing the relation between water storage and gravity change is promising for hydrologists, in closing the water balance, as well as for geophysicists, in detecting the real long-term gravity change. The Global Geodynamics Project (GGP) began in 1997 with the purpose to record the Earth’s gravity field with high accuracy at a number of worldwide stations using su-perconducting gravimeters (SG). The Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment (GRACE), jointly implemented by NASA and DLR, is a dedicated twin satellite mission (launched in March 2002) whose objective is to map the Earth’s gravity field to high accuracy at monthly intervals. Both GGP and GRACE recognise that tracking the movement of water on and be-neath the earth surface is one of the main goals, and thus promise a significant development in hydrological studies. This paper examines the local hydrological effect on gravity at the Geodynamic Observatory Moxa, Germany, by means of time series analysis and distributed hydrological modeling