Surface deformation in California's Central Valley (CV) has long been linked to changes in groundwater storage. Recent advances in remote sensing have enabled the mapping of CV deformation and associated changes in groundwater resources at increasingly higher spatiotemporal resolution. Here, we use interferometric synthetic aperture radar (InSAR) from the Sentinel‐1 missions, augmented by continuous Global Positioning System (cGPS) positioning, to characterize the surface deformation of the San Joaquin Valley (SJV, southern two‐thirds of the CV) for consecutive dry (2016) and wet (2017) water years. We separate trends and seasonal oscillations in deformation time series and interpret them in the context of surface and groundwater hydrology. We find that subsidence rates in 2016 (mean −42.0 mm/yr; peak −345 mm/yr) are twice that in 2017 (mean −20.4 mm/yr; peak −177 mm/yr), consistent with increased groundwater pumping in 2016 to offset the loss of surface‐water deliveries. Locations of greatest subsidence migrated outwards from the valley axis in the wetter 2017 water year, possibly reflecting a surplus of surface‐water supplies in the lowest portions of the SJV. Patterns in the amplitude of seasonal deformation and the timing of peak seasonal uplift reveal entry points and potential pathways for groundwater recharge into the SJV and subsequent groundwater flow within the aquifer. This study provides novel insight into the SJV aquifer system that can be used to constrain groundwater flow and subsidence models, which has relevance to groundwater management in the context of California's 2014 Sustainable Groundwater Management Act (SGMA).

Increased climate variability is driving changes in water storage across the contiguous United States (CONUS). Observational estimates of these storage changes are important for validation of hydrological models and predicting future water availability. We estimate CONUS terrestrial water storage anomalies (TWSA) from 2007–2017 using Global Positioning System (GPS) displacements, constrained by lower‐resolution TWSA observations from Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment (GRACE) satellite gravity—a combination that provides higher spatiotemporal resolution than previous estimates. The relative contribution of seasonal, interannual, and subseasonal TWSA varies widely across CONUS watersheds, with implications for regional water security. Separately, we find positive correlation between TWSA and the El Niño/Southern Oscillation in the southeastern Texas‐Gulf and South Atlantic‐Gulf watersheds and an unexpected negative correlation in the southwest. In the western United States, atmospheric rivers (ARs) drive a large fraction of subseasonal TWSA, with the top 5% of ARs contributing 73% of total AR‐related TWSA increases.

We present GPS, hydrological, and GRACE (Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment) observations in southern Apennines (Italy) pointing to a previously unnoticed response of the solid Earth to hydrological processes. Transient patterns in GPS horizontal time series near to large karst aquifers are controlled by seasonal and interannual phases of groundwater recharge/discharge of karst aquifers, modulating the extensional ∼3 mm/yr strain within the tectonically active Apennines. We suggest that transient signals are produced, below the saturation level of the aquifers and above a poorly constrained depth in the shallow crust, by time‐dependent opening of subvertical, fluid‐filled, conductive fractures. We ascribe this process to the immature karstification and intense tectonic fracturing, favoring slow groundwater circulation, and to multiyear variations of the water table elevation, influenced by variable seasonal recharge. The vertical component displays seasonal and multiyear signals more homogeneously distributed in space and closely correlated with estimates of total water storage from GRACE, reflecting the elastic response of the lithosphere to variations of surface water loads. The different sensitivities of vertical and horizontal components to the hydrologically induced deformation processes allow us to spatially and temporally resolve the different phases of the water cycle, from maximum hydrological loading at the surface to maximum hydrostatic pressure beneath karst aquifers. Finally, we suggest that transient deformation signals in the geodetic series of the Apennines are correlated to large‐scale climatic patterns (Northern Atlantic Oscillation) through their influence on precipitation variability and trends at the regional scale.

Triggered seismicity in karst regions has been explained assuming the existence of a hydraulically connected fracture system and downward diffusion of surface pore pressures. Karst systems are, in fact, able to swiftly channel large amount of rainfall through networks of conduits increasing the hydraulic head loading upon the fluid‐saturated, poroelastic crust. Here we use Global Positioning System and hydrological and seismicity data to show that poroelastic strain in the shallow crust (0–3.5 km) controls seasonal and multiannual modulation of seismicity along the Irpinia Fault Zone (Southern Italy) without requiring a hydraulically connected fracture system from the surface to hypocentral depths. We suggest that groundwater recharge of karst aquifers along the Irpinia Fault Zone produces stress perturbations large enough to modulate strain accumulation and seismicity and temporarily modify the probability of nucleation of seismic events such as the 1980 Irpinia, M _S 6.9, earthquake.

Earth surface displacements from interferometric synthetic aperture radar (InSAR) have long been used to study deformation from a wide range of geophysical processes. Whereas deformation rates can be robustly estimated from InSAR by averaging many individual deformation observations, noise in these observations has limited their utility for generating deformation time series. In this article, we introduce a novel combination of InSAR and Global Positioning System (GPS) data that align InSAR displacements to an absolute reference and reduces long-wavelength spatial errors prior to InSAR time series construction. We test our GInSAR (GPS-enhanced InSAR) methodology on Sentinel-1 data over the southern Central Valley, CA, USA, comparing GInSAR displacement velocities and time series with those from three other referencing techniques. We find that the GInSAR approach outperforms alternative methods, yielding mm-level displacement differences with respect to collocated cGPS. By contrast, other referencing methods can overestimate peak subsidence velocities in the Central Valley by upwards of 10%, deviate by tens of millimeters relative to cGPS validation time series, and contain spatial biases absent in the GInSAR methodology. We also present a modification to the widely used small baseline subset (SBAS) technique for time series estimation, whereby we use a temporal connectedness constraint to regularize the mathematical inversion and increase the number of InSAR pixels with valid time series estimates.