GRACE based groundwater drought evaluation of Ganga Basin and analysis of drought propagation using wavelet based quantitative approach

The Ganga River Basin which is the home of almost half a billion people have plunged into groundwater drought due to anthropogenic activities. Hence groundwater drought assessment and its propagation from the meteorological drought is highly required for the Ganga River Basin. This paper focuses on the evaluation of historical groundwater drought using Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment (GRACE) and Global Land Data Assimilation System (GLDAS) dataset, further to obtain the drought propagation times. Traditionally the drought propagation time is obtained from the correlation between groundwater drought time series and various scales of meteorological time series. However, the GRACE-derived groundwater drought index (GGDI) showed lesser correlation with the Standardized Precipitation Index (SPI) / Standardized Precipitation Evapotranspiration Index (SPEI) due to the presence of consistent trend in the GGDI series. Hence, a novel quantitative approach using Cross Wavelet Transform (XWT) is introduced to determine the drought propagation time which can devoid of the contribution of anthropogenic activities. Extracting the significant power area of XWT of GGDI with SPI/SPEI of different scales led to the determination of groundwater drought propagation time. The results showed Groundwater Storage Anomaly (GWSA) has a steep downtrend for Upper Gangetic Basin (UGB) (-26.2 mm/year) and Yamuna Chambal Basin (YCB) (-21.8 mm/year). It was observed that UGB and YCB faced groundwater drought from 2017 to 2022. The wavelet analysis showed that the drought propagation time of YCB is 14 months, UGB is 17 months, and the Lower Gangetic Basin (LGB) is 21 months. The frequency domain analysis of the drought signals suggested YCB had a faster response to the meteorological forcing, and LGB had the slowest response.