An investigation of ocean mass budget in the East China Sea during the GRACE era

The Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment (GRACE) mission provides uniquely high-precision observations for monitoring ocean mass changes (OMC), allowing for the establishment and evaluation of the ocean mass budget in conjunction with satellite altimetry and temperature and salinity observations. However, it is challenging to perform OMC closed-loop validation in the East China Sea (ECS) due to potential biases in the individual model and the lack of certain data processing. In this study, we comprehensively analyze the ocean mass budget in the ECS during the GRACE era (2005–2015) by utilizing multiple datasets, mainly consisting of three official GRACE RL06 solutions, three altimetry products, and four ocean reanalysis products. The effect of ocean bottom deformation, neglected in previous studies, is −0.38 ± 0.06 mm/yr, and we estimate a more accurate ensemble sea level change to be 4.05 ± 1.50 mm/yr in the ECS from the altimetry products. There are discrepancies between leakage-corrected GRACE OMC observations and steric-corrected altimeter OMC estimations in both the seasonal signals and the long-term trends (e.g., 6.25 mm/yr vs. 4.22 mm/yr). These discrepancies are strongly correlated with sediment runoff from the Yangtze River and in-situ sediment observations, suggesting that ocean sediment accumulation should be considered in the ocean mass budget in the ECS. Since in-situ sediment data are estimated over ∼100 years, we employ an empirical estimation method to determine the corresponding data during the period 2005–2015, to avoid potential biases caused by inconsistencies in observational timespans. The results show that sediment mass changes can explain about 96 % of residual trends. Our results emphasize the significant impact of sediment on improving the ocean mass budget in the ECS, offering a novel perspective for estimating ocean mass changes in other coastal regions.