Evaluation of groundwater storage changes using GRACE satellite data in Ravansar plain aquifer in Kermanshah province

The drop in water level in the aquifers of Kermanshah province has been so severe that it has reached about 10 meters in some places. The purpose of this study is to evaluate GRACE satellite data to estimate the groundwater storage of Ravansar aquifer in Kermanshah province. Therefore, in this study, while examining the water level of Ravansar aquifer observation wells and also the spatial zoning of these changes, the current situation of the region was evaluated using Kriging method in GIS software. Then, in order to evaluate the GRACE satellite data, the JPL, GFS, CSR, and CRI algorithms were coded in Google Earth Engine cloud computing environment, and then the monthly and annual changes of liquid water Equivalent (LWE) were calculated. Also, the amount of Soil Moisture (SM) was estimated from the GLDAS hydrological model and by subtracting the amount of soil moisture from the estimated values of GRACE , the amount of changes in groundwater storage compared to its observational values was obtained. This study showed that not only can GRACE data be used to estimate the rate of changes in groundwater storage in aquifers, but also the data are of acceptable accuracy. Comparison of the results of different algorithms showed that the JP algorithm with a correlation coefficient of 0.73 has the highest correlation with observational data. According to the JPL , the values of changes in groundwater storage estimated from GRACE compared to the observed values show a decrease in groundwater storage of -1.8 cm.