A new runoff calculation model based on multi-source radar remote sensing technology

Abstract

River runoff changing will directly affect the safety of the surrounding areas. In theory, river runoff can be calculated from water depth, river width and flow velocity. But in the actual monitoring, the observation of water depth, river width and flow velocity is complex. Radar remote sensing can observe target all-time and all-weather, and has the ability to penetrate clouds, rain and fog. The common Radar remote sensing runoff calculation model is depth-runoff relationship model, which is constructed by fitting water depth and in-situ runoff. The river depth is derived from Radar Altimetry (RA) data. But this model has only one input parameter, the accuracy of this model inverted runoff is not high. In view of the above problems, this paper proposed the Multi-source Radar Remote Sensing Runoff Calculation Model (MRRS-RCM). Firstly, river width and relative water depth were derived from Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) images and RA data. Secondly, based on the Manning's equation, the flow velocity were described from river width and relative water depth. Thirdly, river width relative water depth, and in-situ runoff were fitted to construct MRRS-RCM. Experiments show the accuracy of MRRS-RCM estimated runoff is better than depth-runoff relationship model, the RRMSE values of MRRS-RCM reach 13%.