Water storage redistribution over East China, between 2003 and 2015, driven by intra- and inter-annual climate variability

Abstract National development and resilience are strained by shifting regional water storage patterns. The water shifting pattern has been found over China, but the underlying climate mechanisms of the pattern remain largely unexplored. In this study, how shifting regional moisture conditions are related to intra-annual and inter-annual atmospheric oscillations can be explored by terrestrial water storage (TWS) derived from the Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment (GRACE). Using a principal component analysis (PCA), the TWSs over the East China were divided into two spatial empirical orthogonal functions (EOFs), accounting for more than 70% of the total spatial variance. The first TWS EOF is related to the seasonal variation, whereas the second TWS EOF is associated with the spatial distribution of TWS trend. In addition, the PCA trend results for precipitation and actual evapotranspiration (ET) are consistent with TWS, with a correlation of 0.44 (p