Global terrestrial water-storage reconstruction, hydrological model niches and held-out residual diagnostics

It brings together gridded water-storage estimates and numerical evidence for regional model contributions, their persistence through time, and their correspondence with independent groundwater and surface-water observations.</p><p dir="ltr">The NetCDF products comprise a monthly terrestrial water-storage anomaly reconstruction for 1901–2019 on a global 0.5° land grid, historical predictor-support flags, and diagnostic residuals for 180 observed months within April 2002–December 2019.

The reconstruction includes persistent and monthly model weights, ensemble components and variability among fitted reconstructions. Water-storage anomalies are expressed in millimetres of equivalent water thickness relative to January 2004–December 2009. Diagnostic residuals are calculated as GRACE observations minus predictions evaluated in periods excluded from model fitting and selection; companion fields describe sensitivity to the GRACE target construction.</p><p dir="ltr">A separate source-data ZIP provides machine-readable inputs for the main and supplementary figures and tables, including temporal recurrence, external-observation comparisons, hydroclimatic associations, basin-scale performance, low-storage conditions and surface-water residual analyses.