Publication Date

2020

Journal or Book Title

Remote Sensing

Abstract

The Surface Water and Ocean Topography (SWOT) satellite mission, expected to launch in 2022, will enable near global river discharge estimation from surface water extents and elevations. However, SWOT’s orbit specifications provide non-uniform space–time sampling. Previous studies have demonstrated that SWOT’s unique spatiotemporal sampling has a minimal impact on derived discharge frequency distributions, baseflow magnitudes, and annual discharge characteristics. In this study, we aim to extend the analysis of SWOT’s added value in the context of hydrologic model calibration. We calibrate a hydrologic model using previously derived synthetic SWOT discharges across 39 gauges in the Ohio River Basin. Three discharge timeseries are used for calibration: daily observations, SWOT temporally sampled, and SWOT temporally sampled including estimated uncertainty. Using 10,000 model iterations to explore predefined parameter ranges, each discharge timeseries results in similar optimal model parameters. We find that the annual mean and peak flow values at each gauge location from the optimal parameter sets derived from each discharge timeseries differ by less than 10% percent on average. Our findings suggest that hydrologic models calibrated using discharges derived from SWOT’s non-uniform space–time sampling are likely to achieve results similar to those based on calibrating with in situ daily observations.

DOI

https://doi.org/10.3390/rs12193241

Volume

12

Special Issue

Remote Sensing and Modeling of Land Surface Water

Issue

19

License

UMass Amherst Open Access Policy

Creative Commons License

Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.

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