Closure in the Earth's angular momentum budget observed from subseasonal periods down to four days: No core effects needed

International audienceShort period variations in the Earth's rotation rate, length‐of‐day (LOD), are driven mainly by the atmosphere with smaller contributions by the oceans. Previous studies have noted a lag of atmospheric angular momentum (AAM) with LOD that would imply another source. We examine AAM from the European Centre for Medium‐Range Weather Forecasts (ECMWF) and the National Centers for Environmental Prediction (NCEP) reanalysis series, along with oceanic angular momentum (OAM) from the ECCO consortium; land hydrological effects made no discernible impact. The NCEP reanalysis together with OAM produces a significant lag with LOD, while the ECMWF reanalysis AAM with OAM shows no phase lag. We find significant coherence with LOD variations down to periods of 4 days; coherence losses at shorter periods likely arise from the inverted barometer assumption and unmodeled dynamical processes. Thus the inclusion of core effects is not needed to balance the axial angular momentum budget on sub‐seasonal time scales

Estimation des biais et précisions des marégraphes par combinaison de plusieurs séries temporelles co-localisées.

International audienc

Hydrogeological effects on terrestrial gravity measurements

For the 20 last years, terrestrial and satellite gravity measurements have reached such a precision that they allow for identification of the signatures from water storage fluctuations. In particular, hydrogeological effects induce significant time-correlated signature in the gravity time series. Gravity response to rainfall is a complex function of the local geologic and climatic conditions, e.g., rock porosity, vegetation, evaporation, and runoff rates. The gravity signal combines contributions from many geophysical processes, source separation being a major challenge. At the local scale and short-term, the associated gravimetric signatures often exceed the tectonic and GIA effects, and monitoring gravity changes is a source of information on local groundwater mass balance, and contributes to model calibrations. Some aquifer main characteristics can then be inferred by combining continuous gravity, geophysical and hydrogeological measurements. In Membach, Belgium, a superconducting gravimeter has monitored gravity continuously for more than 24 years. This long time series, together with 300 repeated absolute gravity measurements and environmental monitoring, has provided valuable information on the instrumental, metrological, hydrogeological and geophysical points of view. This has allowed separating the signal sources and monitoring partial saturation dynamics in the unsaturated zone, convective precipitation and evapotranspiration at a scale of up to 1 km², for signals smaller than 1 nm/s², equivalent to 2.5 mm of water. Based on this experience, another superconducting gravimeter was installed in 2014 in the karst zone of Rochefort, Belgium. In a karst area, where the vadose zone is usually thicker than in other contexts, combining gravity measurements at the surface and inside accessible caves is a way to separate the contribution from the unsaturated zone lying between the two instruments, from the saturated zone underneath the cave, and the common mode effects from the atmosphere or other regional processes. Those experiments contribute to the assessment of the terrestrial hydrological cycle, which is a major challenge of the geosciences associated with key societal issues: availability of freshwater, mitigation of flood hazards, or measurement of evapotranspiration

The gravity of geophysics

A recent article in Reviews of Geophysics examined terrestrial techniques for measuring changes in gravity over time and their application to the geosciences.</jats:p

Detecting hydrological connectivity using causal inference from time series: synthetic and real karstic case studies

We investigate the potential of causal inference methods (CIMs) to reveal hydrological connections from time series. Four CIMs are selected from two criteria, linear or nonlinear and bivariate or multivariate. A priori, multivariate, and nonlinear CIMs are best suited for revealing hydrological connections because they fit nonlinear processes and deal with confounding factors such as rainfall, evapotranspiration, or seasonality. The four methods are applied to a synthetic case and a real karstic case study. The synthetic experiment confirms our expectation: unlike the other methods, the multivariate nonlinear framework has a low false-positive rate and allows for ruling out a connection between two disconnected reservoirs forced with similar effective precipitation. However, for the real case study, the multivariate nonlinear method was unstable because of the uneven distribution of missing values affecting the final sample size for the multivariate analyses, forcing us to cope with the results' robustness. Nevertheless, if we recommend a nonlinear multivariate framework to reveal actual hydrological connections, all CIMs bring valuable insights into the system's dynamics, making them a cost-effective and recommendable comparative tool for exploring data. Still, causal inference remains attached to subjective choices, operational constraints, and hypotheses challenging to test. As a result, the robustness of the conclusions that the CIMs can draw always deserves caution, especially with real, imperfect, and limited data. Therefore, alongside research perspectives, we encourage a flexible, informed, and limit-aware use of CIMs without omitting any other approach that aims at the causal understanding of a system

Coseismic and post-seismic signatures of the Sumatra 2004 December and 2005 March earthquakes in GRACE satellite gravity

International audienceS U M M A R Y The GRACE satellite mission has been measuring the Earth's gravity field and its temporal variations since 2002 April. Although these variations are mainly due to mass transfer within the geofluid envelops, they also result from mass displacements associated with phenomena including glacial isostatic adjustment and earthquakes. However, these last contributions are difficult to isolate because of the presence of noise and of geofluid signals, and because of GRACE's coarse spatial resolution (>400 km half-wavelength). In this paper, we show that a wavelet analysis on the sphere helps to retrieve earthquake signatures from GRACE geoid products. Using a wavelet analysis of GRACE geoids products, we show that the geoid variations caused by the 2004 December (M w = 9.2) and 2005 March (M w = 8.7) Sumatra earthquakes can be detected. At GRACE resolution, the 2004 December earthquake produced a strong coseismic decrease of the gravity field in the Andaman Sea, followed by relaxation in the area affected by both the Andaman 2004 and the Nias 2005 earthquakes. We find two characteristic timescales for the relaxation, with a fast variation occurring in the vicinity of the Central Andaman ridge. We discuss our coseismic observations in terms of density changes of crustal and upper-mantle rocks, and of the vertical displacements in the Andaman Sea. We interpret the post-seismic signal in terms of the viscoelastic response of the Earth's mantle. The transient component of the relaxation may indicate the presence of hot, viscous material beneath the active Central Andaman Basin

Hydrogeological effects on terrestrial gravity measurements

For the 20 last years, terrestrial and satellite gravity measurements have reached such a precision that they allow for identification of the signatures from water storage fluctuations. In particular, hydrogeological effects induce significant time-correlated signature in the gravity time series. Gravity response to rainfall is a complex function of the local geologic and climatic conditions, e.g., rock porosity, vegetation, evaporation, and runoff rates. The gravity signal combines contributions from many geophysical processes, source separation being a major challenge. At the local scale and short-term, the associated gravimetric signatures often exceed the tectonic and GIA effects, and monitoring gravity changes is a source of information on local groundwater mass balance, and contributes to model calibrations. Some aquifer main characteristics can then be inferred by combining continuous gravity, geophysical and hydrogeological measurements. In Membach, Belgium, a superconducting gravimeter has monitored gravity continuously for more than 24 years. This long time series, together with 300 repeated absolute gravity measurements and environmental monitoring, has provided valuable information on the instrumental, metrological, hydrogeological and geophysical points of view. This has allowed separating the signal sources and monitoring partial saturation dynamics in the unsaturated zone, convective precipitation and evapotranspiration at a scale of up to 1 km², for signals smaller than 1 nm/s², equivalent to 2.5 mm of water. Based on this experience, another superconducting gravimeter was installed in 2014 in the karst zone of Rochefort, Belgium. In a karst area, where the vadose zone is usually thicker than in other contexts, combining gravity measurements at the surface and inside accessible caves is a way to separate the contribution from the unsaturated zone lying between the two instruments, from the saturated zone underneath the cave, and the common mode effects from the atmosphere or other regional processes. Those experiments contribute to the assessment of the terrestrial hydrological cycle, which is a major challenge of the geosciences associated with key societal issues: availability of freshwater, mitigation of flood hazards, or measurement of evapotranspiration

Effet de l'atmosphère et de l'océan sur la rotation de la terre ; application numérique au calcul des nutations

Doctorat en sciences - UCL, 199

Atmospheric contributions to nutations and implications for the estimation of deep Earth's properties from nutation observations

International audienceWe propose a new estimation of the atmospheric contributions to Earth's nutations based on three reanalyses of atmospheric global circulation models (GCM), namely the two reanalyses of the National Center for Environmental Prediction (NCEP) and the ERA-40 reanalysis of the European Center for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts (ECMWF). We estimate the complex amplitudes of the periodic terms in the atmospheric forcing and convolve them with a transfer function for a three-layers Earth with an anelastic mantle and dissipative couplings at the fluid core boundaries. Unlike previous estimations based on operational GCMs, the results we obtain here from the three reanalysis GCMs are in good agreement, which makes them more reliable. From a joint inversion of the three atmospheric models on their common time span (from 1979 to 2002.3), we estimate the atmospheric contributions to nutations to be -38.2 ± 0.4 μas in-phase (ip) and 65.1 ± 0.4 μas out-of-phase (op) on the prograde annual term (S1), -64 ± 5 μas ip and 29 ± 5 μas op on the retrograde annual term (ψ1), and -11.3 ± 0.3 μas ip and 41.5 ± 0.3 μas op on the prograde semi-annual term (P1). As the atmospheric contributions to nutation vary in time, we also compute their time-variability on the time span from 1979 to 2010. In particular, we show that the contribution to ψ1 has a very large time variability but that these variations are well determined by the atmospheric models that we use. Finally, we explore the implications of the atmospheric contribution to ψ1 on the estimation of Earth's deep interior properties from nutation observations. We show that this contribution is too small to affect significantly the estimation of these properties