Accurate statistical seasonal streamflow forecasts developed by incorporating remote sensing soil moisture and terrestrial water storage anomaly information

Abstract

Water managers need improved seasonal streamflow forecasts in drought-prone regions like the U.S. Great Plains, where the inter-annual variability in rainfall and streamflow is high and seasonal streamflow forecasting systems are not well developed. Recent research has demonstrated that in-situ soil moisture measurements can be used to produce accurate streamflow forecasts in the Great Plains where rainfall runoff is the predominant source of streamflow. However, an inadequate density of in-situ soil moisture monitoring locations makes producing such forecasts impossible in many locations. Therefore, our objective was to develop and quantify the accuracy of seasonal streamflow forecasts for rainfall-dominated watersheds using remotely sensed data. Precipitation and remotely sensed soil moisture and terrestrial water storage anomaly data were incorporated into a multiple linear regression (MLR) model to produce seasonal streamflow forecasts for five watersheds in the Great Plains. The best MLR models had Nash-Sutcliffe Efficiency (NSE) values ranging from 0.71 to 0.93, indicating good to very good model performance. In one watershed with nearby in-situ soil moisture data, the use of remotely sensed soil moisture data led to greater forecast accuracy than did the inclusion of the sparse in-situ data. Our results show that the use of remote sensing data in MLR models can provide accurate seasonal streamflow forecasts in rainfall-dominated regions which currently lack such information.